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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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NYT has released an article about unmarked graves in Canada.

They quote Tom Flanagan about lack of concrete evidence for child graves:

“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.

“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”

The arguments by Mr. Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, who made the announcement about the Kamloops site, said: “The denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”

Why are the denialists hurtful, Chief Rosanne? Wouldn't it be great news if there are no unmarked graves?

“We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” Chief Casimir said. “It is very difficult and it is definitely very complex. We know that it’ll take time. And we also know that we have many steps yet to go.”

“We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”

So, the current course of action is to continue not knowing for sure.

“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”

The article conveniently omits which evidence is compelling.

The comments seem like a breath of fresh air:

So having read this article, I’ve learned that native children were in the past treated horribly by the government, and that today there is a vigorous debate about how to remember that. But the article doesn’t tell us whether there is actual evidence for mass graves.

The ground penetrating radar results showed disturbances that could be bodies, or tree roots, or something else. There's simply no way to tell unless there are excavations.

When these results were announced in 2021, the country was led to believe these were likely children's graves. Flags were lowered for months. It was reported as a deeply shameful fact, and it really undermined people's pride in their country.

Shockingly, no one in authority has tried to actually get to the bottom of what actually lies underground. If these were clandestine graves there should be criminal investigations. If these are tree roots, then this should be a very cautionary tale against preliminary investigation results being taken as fact and then used for political purposes.

All of the above is totally separate from the real and well documented suffering of Indigenous children wrongly taken from their parents and placed in those awful schools. But it does their memory no credit to make unproven claims in their name.

And now we come to the comment, due to which I started writing all this:

It is sad this is the most recommended comment, which is simply refuted in the second sentence of the article.

Racism abound.

Quote from the article:

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.

Another comment:

Same old rightwing playbook. Deny, obfuscate and rely on sophistry to prove that nothing is real unless they agree with it.

There are so many known and proven ways, in which First Nations were harmed. I can't imagine my child being taken away from me to be reeducated in some way in general, let alone experimented on. Taking away children from their parents causes a visceral reaction in me. I can't imagine the pain and which downstream effects this would cause to a community.

Setting all of the compassion I feel on the personal level aside, why do we need to invent new ways for the indigenous people to be oppressed? Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point? Why do liberals seem to be content with this state of affairs?

It all comes down to this, and it's a very cynical and bitter conclusion: it's profitable to lie. Would, for example, this documentary* be made? Would the feds give $27 million to National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation? Would provinces pledge more money for searches? (god knows which unreliable methods would this money be spent on in the future. Divination? Remote viewing? Not out of the question apparently).

And the same tired tactics are used to browbeat the skeptics into "believing science", again. Who cares that for now ground scanning radar found exactly 0 buried kids? It doesn't matter, Catholics killed kids. It's plain and simple, champ. Just be more centered. Do better. Be less racist. Catholic churches on fire be damned. What's one church against maybe existing child remains?

Chief Nepinak from the CBC article above:

“I think the vocal majority in the room, in the community engagements, wanted certainty. They wanted to find the truth. They wanted people held accountable,” Nepinak said. “And to that end, you know, we prioritized that, that voice.”

Apparently, it's easy to exhume, even if the act of doing so violates religious beliefs. And now Pine Creek First Nation knows for certain: no unmarked graves where the ground scanning radar found the anomalies. Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, on the other hand, would prefer to not know.

* This documentary is stunningly scare on content. Julian Brave NoiseCat shows us a lot of tears over the dead children, lying in those unmarked graves. A lot of interpersonal trauma. People hurting other people - there's a scene where he confronts his absentee father about spending the childhood without him. They find a survivor of residential schools who recounts a story about putting a newborn baby, who was the result of an indigenous girl being raped by a priest, in an incinerator. Of course there's no evidence outside of this single account. The whole RAPE BABY INCINERATION is mentioned in passing. One of the main characters is an activist woman, who's trying to uncover the whole truth about the residential schools for 50 years and the only thing that she now clings to is... unmarked graves. Widespread evidence of abuse is so widespread, one person can apparently dig for 50 years and come up with nothing.

Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point?

Yes. An example of this has stuck in my mind the past couple months. I was listening to this Bari Weiss podcast on a run. It focuses on the story of Matthew Shepard which was "the most notorious anti-gay hate crime in American history." A national tragedy and outrage of the 90's, so city liberals had so more evidence to deride the experience of small town bigotry. They wrote a play and made a movie about it.

Matthew Shepard was a young gay man living in a college town in Wyoming. He was found murdered and tortured to death in 1998. The narrative of "gay man butchered to death for gaying too gayly" galvanized gay rights advocates for the follow decade. Contemporary reporting very quickly turned to gay hate crime. This podcast is an hour long conversation with author Ben Kwaller who did first-hand reporting in Laramie, Wyoming and research on the murder for a book with a different conclusion.

Turns out that there is a fair bit of evidence and testimony that Matthew Shepard probably wasn't murdered for being gay. Because Matt used and sold meth. He was murdered by a guy he sometimes had meth dealings with, and probably had sex with according to other testimony. The gruesome nature of his murder was possibly not the product of virulent gay bashing, but a meth fueled macabre butchery. Done by a desperate, indebted addict whose life was falling apart. His murderer had not slept or consumed anything except drugs for several days.

In the Honestly episode Ben Kwaller shares recordings of one of his visits to Laramie. Ben (who is gay) goes to some college LGBTQ+ group and interviews them. He asks what the town thinks of the countervailing narrative. He wants to know if they at all consider the implications that their narrative was wrong. One of students says that Ben, the guest and author, should stop asking these questions, because they make him uncomfortable. I won't find the time stamp unless asked, but I can hear his voice say the words "read the room."

The student meant that this is our rallying cry. Think of all the good that has come out of this noble lie. Imagine a world where gays across America didn't believe Matthew Shepard, their avatar, was brutally murdered for being gay. We might not even have gay marriage! We might not have all these vigils and community and influence. Stop asking questions. Let us have it.

"Read the room." I'm not particularly black pilled, but conflict theorists do be winning sometimes.

Now I expended all my typing on a semi-related event. I do appreciate the write up. It's good. But, frankly, I am tired of the mass graves story. I can't draw the energy to care that the NYT finally reported on a story with marginally more integrity than the CBC has ever had. This specific article was written just over a year ago. It has the mainstream framing of the topic in August 2023, which is years after journalists had plenty of reasons to ask meaningful questions about the narrative. I'm sure we have had dozens of top-level mass graves threads in the Culture War Roundup's various forms. It keeps on chugging along.

The mass graves story, and how deep its roots grew into Canadian society, was an eye opener at the time. First, it demonstrated that Canadians had ended any and all resistance to the American culture war waged at their doorstep. Not only did Canada capitulate, but Canada picked up the banner and dedicated itself wholeheartedly to the cause. Progress. Truth seeking doesn't always scratch an itch. People want to prostrate themselves before a greater power. Canada's elite, advocacy groups, certain tribal leaders, and media saw they could leverage that desire for gain. Why not? A new national past time is born.

Canada doesn't really have the same sort of adversarial media presence that the US does, does it? If a few Native American leaders enrich themselves, a few politicians win elections, and some money gets embezzled because we're telling a noble lie, so what? Think of all the good that has come out of this. Read the room.

The student meant that this is our rallying cry. Think of all the good that has come out of this noble lie. Imagine a world where gays across America didn't believe Matthew Shepard, their avatar, was brutally murdered for being gay. We might not even have gay marriage! We might not have all these vigils and community and influence. Stop asking questions. Let us have it.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but one problem with this approach is that it requires ever more sordid lies to be concocted in order to generate the same level of activist outrage…nominative determinism strikes again?

I will caveat that while the Shepard murder is definitely murkier than the mainstream sanitized version of events, the Jimenez version has its own limitations.

Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point?

Earlier today I started doing a writeup on these events after seeing headlines to the effect of, "box knife used to carve racial slur into flesh of college student." My first thought was "if it's not a straight up hoax, then it may be the most unambiguously racist crime I've ever heard of." But I ended up abandoning the post because I couldn't figure out what to say beyond "I'd like to say 'wait and see' but I kind of doubt we'll ever see."

Reading between the lines, it seems like the actual events were: two college kids who were friends got up to some shenanigans with a sharp object, including writing "the N-word" on the chest of the black friend. The writing is variously described as "scratching," "cutting," and "carving," depending on who is talking about it, and the implement is variously described as plastic, ceramic, a box cutter, a box knife... no pictures of the implement or actual slur appear in evidence. Some upperclassmen reported these shenanigans to their coaches, who kicked both the perpetrator and the "victim" off the team.

To carve a legible word into someone's flesh requires either dramatically overpowering strength, a gang of lackeys holding the victim down, or the cooperation of the victim. The victim also was apparently not the one to report the events, though the victim's family is quite upset about the whole thing. So my best guess is that the two friends decided to do something edgy together, or maybe the victim is easily suggestible for some reason. But of course the whole story now is about racism instead of about the general foolishness one gets when young athletic males are gathered together with no purpose but to "have some fun." And not just any racism, but "carving the N-word into the flesh" of the victim! Now that's a headline to sell some papers! Nuanced discussion of how racial slurs have become one of very few kinds of language young people can use to genuinely shock and disturb, such that most utterances of racial slurs are probably disconnected from actual racism (of the "race X is inherently superior to race Y" variety), is right out.

Now, for all I know the perpetrator is 6'7" and can bench press a horse, while the victim is 5'5" and 100lbs. soaking wet, and the perpetrator is a Good Old Boy who always wanted his own scarified slave or something, and this was every bit as horrific as the headlines imply. But I don't know, and I doubt I ever will, and as long as no one really knows, we can all just tell ourselves whatever story we want to tell ourselves about how these events totally reinforce all our existing beliefs and biases.

Hopefully you can see how that's not a tangent at all, despite me not commenting on the exhausting superposition of "gravesites" which are probably mostly not gravesites. But so long as they might be, well, then there is money to be made and power to be grabbed by peddling a narrative. The story is more useful--arguably to both proponents and opponents--as long as it remains uncertain.

Truth is the only casualty, and who (but the occasional Internet autist) cares about that?

Some observations:

  1. As multiple other commenters note, residential schools were a very progressive idea for their time. The kind of person running it was clearly the same kind of person now criticising it, even with largely similar values. Given that progressives are considered the side of empathy - most conservatives main complaint is their excess of empathy - this makes me weep for the project of empathy as a whole. If people fail to empathize with themselves, projected into the past, how can they possibly empathise with other people?

  2. The contrarian in me obviously wants to just exhume everything and see whether there is anything at all; But to some degree that still buys into a framing that imo is entirely unfounded. To our knowledge, we know that conditions in foster institutions were generally quite bad independent of the skin color of the child for a long time, not to mention that many kids already were mistreated even before they entered them. We know some of them died due to this. Even if they were being buried locally, that is still no proof whatsoever for the wild claims of murderous racism.

  3. It strikes me again just how little connection there seems to be between people getting into positions of power in native american councils and actually being, you know, native american. "Chief Rosanne Casimir", who argues against exhumations, looks much less native than "Rancher Garry Gottfriedson", who argues in favor! And sure enough, Garry is an actual former residential school student.

There were schools and orphanages in Ireland within living memory that were worse, and nobody outside that country cares, because the victims weren't part of a "marginalized group."

How I learned about this.

I think that exhuming any suspected graves on residential school grounds where name and date + cause of death are uncertain is obviously the correct thing to do.

Many forms of murder would be still visible on the skeleton. Some signs of severe abuse might also be preserved.

Given what I know about Catholics, I think it is highly unlikely they ran death camps. They almost certainly employed violence against their wardens, probably of a severity for which today's society would feel that you should never have power over any kids ever again. I would not be shocked if an investigation discovered poorly healed fractures linked to child abuse. Very likely there was also some sexual abuse going on (a common outcome when men have a lot of power without oversight, even when not specifically selecting for men who decided to forswear church-sanctioned sex), but that will rarely be provable from the forensic record.

I also presume that the white staff had a higher caloric intake than the indigenous kids, and that the latter were much more devastated by infectious diseases. All in all, it was a terrible human rights abuse and might technically qualify as genocide.

The way I model Catholics, the kids were probably baptized before they had their first warm meal. And putting the bodies of your fellow Christians (even if they are of a 'lesser race') into anonymous, unmarked mass graves is not usually done. Of course, they likely would not have paid for tombstones either, so what was a marked grave in 1940 could very well be an unmarked grave in 2020 because wooden crosses don't last that long.

I have no sympathy for people who embellish atrocities. Typically, the historical consensus is damning enough. Adding "did we mention that the perpetrators lived on a diet of murdered babies?" is strictly counter-productive (unless true, of course) -- instead of just having the people against you who like to deny or diminish the atrocity for political reasons, you are suddenly opposed by all the people who care about the truth.

The way I model Catholics, the kids were probably baptized before they had their first warm meal.

My understanding is that indigenous parents got to generally choose which residential schools their kids went to- so we can probably assume these kids were Catholic before they arrived.

If people fail to empathize with themselves, projected into the past, how can they possibly empathise with other people?

The left's "empathy" project has never been unlimited and all-encompassing. Only the good people (read the correct newspapers to learn who those are today) deserve empathy, and the bad people deserve nothing but hate. The left can be - and often is - horrendously vicious to those that are considered bad people. And that matters absolutely nothing that they may have held the same ideas or were members of the same movement in the past. Once they are declared the bad people, they are outside the empathy circle, and it is very, very dark on the left outside that circle. Is not the "excess" of empathy, it is very carefully directed allocation of it, deployed along very ideological guidelines.

The left's "empathy" project has never been unlimited and all-encompassing.

This isn't true; the original hippies did actually buy into this (LSD and MDMA likely had something to do with this). Less so in the 90s-00s, but the window of "you're okay" was much wider than it has been since SJ congealed. And even SJers very rarely intend massacre as an end*, though that's a very low bar to clear.

*As in, given a sufficient stranglehold on power, the vast, vast majority of SJers do not want to massacre their enemies. Most are willing to fight a civil war (and many are willing to commit terrorism) if that's the only way to get that stranglehold, but that's a means, not an end in itself. Disenfranchisement, re-education, and institutionalised kidnapping to prevent enemy culture transmission all have significant (though in the latter two cases I'm not sure about majority) support as means to ensure permanent victory, but not massacre.

OK, I can't really talk about the hippy times, I wasn't even born yet then. But given by how many leftists terrorists (Weather Underground, RAF, etc.) existed at that time or immediately after, hippies probably weren't exclusively dominating the leftist mainstream. But those times are long gone, and the hippies are nowhere to be seen, and probably already have been denounced as a racist, cisheteropatriarchal movement (I don't know but it sounds so on brand I am pretty sure somebody already wrote a paper on that).

even SJers very rarely intend massacre as an end

I don't know if they want to massacre their opponents personally, but they are surely A-OK with somebody else doing the job. They are willing to support pretty much any organization that would deploy violence against Western traditional targets or anybody they consider "bad people".

What’s especially galling is that the indigenous kids dying is being framed as murder because communicable diseases that everyone died from back then killed those kids, because the schools lacked proper ventilation. Yes, that’s how Catholics planned to genocide the Indian children. Improper ventilation. How devious! How cunning!

Ironic also that it’s only Catholics bearing the blame, when the Unitarians and other churches also joined in.

From what I can gather, the idea of residential schools at the time was a rather progressive idea: "we can make these kids lives better by bringing them up assimilated with Western education and values." And several prominent Native Americans were at least loosely supportive of the idea (Charles Curtis, Vice President of the US during the Hoover administration comes to mind).

It strikes me as very similar to the far-left/communist meme about who gets to educate your children. And I think even now there would be support for it among progressives as long as you make sure it's for children of the right "undesirables."

the idea of residential schools at the time was a rather progressive idea

Nothing has changed. The Catholics get it worse simply because they're the easiest target for Progressives to engage (for various reasons). They also tend more often to be actually located on the reserves.

there would be support for it among progressives

Progressives already act like this, with force of law.

What do you think "we'll send Indian Affairs CPS to take your kids away if you use their birth name at home" is?
What do you think "if you complain about the teacher's pet raping your kid, you'll be arrested" is?
What do you think "if you engage in your native customs, like letting your kid outside to play unsupervised, you'll be harassed by the State" is?

They'll beat the Indian out of colonize you eventually.
Remember, land acknowledgements are about forcing you to admit that these colonizers own the land.

Ironic also that it’s only Catholics bearing the blame, when the Unitarians and other churches also joined in.

Do you think this is independent of present day politics? The project 2025 scaremongering rabbit hole blames Catholics too. It’s just a progressive meme.

'just' a progressive meme undersells it a little I think -- there's a very real attempt to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment for social engineering reasons, and going after some Unitarians in bumfuck SK wouldn't advance this goal.

In reality the parameters of the project were determined by the (largely Liberal) government of the day -- so if anyone should be getting the hate it's like Robert Borden or something. This does not serve the agenda either, which is why old John A gets so much demonization despite being removed from power around the time the residential school system got really fired up.

just' a progressive meme undersells it a little I think -- there's a very real attempt to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment for social engineering reasons, and going after some Unitarians in bumfuck SK wouldn't advance this goal.

I won't disagree with that, but at the same time there's a limit to how far the cathedral is willing to go there. Hit pieces on St Mary's Kansas seem ambivalent and conspiracy theories about the knights of Malta involvement in project 2025 are not being pushed by DNC attack ads.

I think the lawfare and literal conquest by fire of the churches are doing the job well enough.

Louis Riel did nothing wrong.

I remember Nassim Taleb trying to push back against the "Black Roman" discourse on the grounds that it was erasing proto-Arabs from history. (The question of to what extent modern-day Arabic-speaking North Africans are descended from historical Berbers vs the Arab colonizers is hoary, but "African" i.e. North African Romans were plausibly related to modern-day Arabs in a way that they are not to sub-Saharan blacks). It didn't work - even in the UK blacks are comfortably further up the progressive stack than other ethnic minorities.

Hello, and welcome to the Motte!

Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our rules, particularly on posting about specific groups. Who are these “experts?” Can you show examples of their chud-owning antics? @MadMonzer’s response is a good approach.

“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”

And then the obvious response of "come back to us when one of these ground penetrating radar discovered mass graves turns out to be real, when the success rate exceeds 0%".

Film Review: Am I Racist?

Yesterday I went to go see one of the, uh, more controversial movies of the year. So a plot summary, some general thoughts, and then speculation about the culture war implications.

The story of the movie

It begins with Matt trying to learn about America's systemic racism and be a good ally. I don't know that anyone will actually believe this part, but it's the plot justification. So, he meets with some anti-racism experts and it does not go well. After he's kicked out of a anti-racism workshop when his real identity is discovered, he decides to disguise himself as a hipster, inspired by the fashion choices of his interview subjects for What is a Woman?. He becomes a certified DEI expert on the internet and begins attending interviews and workshops to see what the anti-racists have to say, then attempts to spread the word, still disguised as a hipster. This does not go well either, some stoners call him a racist and then a biker bar decides to hold an intervention about how he needs to respect black people more. So, he decides to sit his white ass down and listen to black people in some dirt poor majority black podunk town in the deep south. A collection of pastors, grannies, and small business owners- all of them very dark black- advise him to put down the critical race theory and pick up the bible.

Instead of taking this advice, he returns to found his own DEI training company. https://www.dotheworkworkshop.com/ is clearly satire, but the film plays it as completely serious, and he recruits the attendees for his first anti-racism workshop on craigslist. They have clearly been told that this is a genuine anti-racist DEI exercise and that the documentary they appear in is for genuine anti-racist DEI educational purposes, and they start walking out as they realize it isn't- some when they have to label themselves on a racist scale, the same one in the link, some when he brings in his racist uncle in a wheelchair for participants to berate over an insensitive joke from twenty years ago, and the rest who don't show signs of mental illness when he brings out the whips for self-flagellation. It is one of the participant's eagerness to actually do the last part which leads him to break character and have an onscreen crisis of faith, which he goes through as a guest appearance as a diversity expert on one of those local news programs my dad always called 'Gay Morning (insert locality)'.

The film ends with a monologue about treating people equally, and the virtue of colorblindness.

General Thoughts

  1. The film subtitled meetings with diversity experts with the fee they charged to appear. While some of them seemed to genuinely be believers, many of them came off as just wanting the money and not caring very much at all about what they were saying. Indeed, a few of them looked like they knew they were appearing in a hostile documentary and were more than happy to do so for the right price. Only one of them- a combative campus activist- seemed ready to make personal sacrifices for the sake of her ideology. I would consider her a bit unhinged, but she has my respect as a true believer. Other than in that one case, the point of anti-racism being a money making industry not very concerned with the people it's notionally helping was made very effectively. In What is a Woman? interviewees got offended at hostile questioning all the time; not here. The mother who made national news about her black children being snubbed by sesame street in particular gave off a strong vibe of 'well I guess I have to stick to this story to collect tens of thousands of dollars, so there we are'.

  2. As you might expect, DEI activists did not come off well. Several of them seemed unhinged, many of them seemed cynically lying. The first anti-racist workshop host(her fee- $30k) mentioned that she felt unsafe emotionally around so many white people to open the workshop. I can, for myself, remember doing some work for my day job at a 'racial healing center' hosting an 'antiracist yoga class'. I felt uncomfortable in the sense of just clearly not belonging, but also a bit creeped out at the sense of fear directed at me, not with the suspicion that I would actually do anything, but just fear because? I also remember wondering how these people were all free at 10 am on a Tuesday. This idea of suspicion of white people doing?, where ? was clearly not any actual action- like they weren't worried about the KKK showing up here or even a white person getting angry and subjecting them to verbal abuse- but just something that upsets the vibes/makes things ritually impure, it's unclear.

  3. The people who more conventionally pay these thousands-of-dollars fees for DEI experts come off as mostly gullible and unwilling to make personal changes or sacrifices. Lots of them are portrayed as very concerned about first world problems. And they would rather spend thousands of dollars for woke Cathari to absolve their guilt than do anything about it. I don't think the intent was to point to anti-racism as an analogue to gnosticism, if for no other reason than the normies not knowing what gnosticism is. But the parallels are really there! A lot of this stuff is knowledge that will be revealed as the initiate becomes purified and perfected from an outside world which is evil and can't be fixed, and can only be guided by the pure ones. There's a scene early in the movie where Matt visits an anti-racist bookstore and is told a book, titled after the N-word(the cover is shown but the title is never pronounced), is one he's not ready for and he should come back later on in his anti-racist journey. But to the Cathari in the film, dropping $$ is the best evidence of separation from the demiurge.

  4. This movie was hilarious, but it did not seem to be a super-reliable source of information. Evidence of selective footage use, careful tricksiness to get damning soundbites, etc was very there. Particular the Robin DiAngelo scene, she came off as perhaps being pressured into doing and agreeing with things she wasn't a fan of- but the interviewees for What is a Woman? would have just kicked him out and forfeited their $15k.

Culture war

First off, I think this really cements that the right has figured out to hit the left by portraying their fringes as ridiculous. No hyperventilating about 1984 or they're coming for our guns- more 'this is what they actually believe(cast in the least charitable possible light)- decide for yourself if it's stupid'. I think this film did an ok job of that, but a much better job of casting DEI experts as being experts in anti-raci$m. It probably shows a broader shift, as well, towards the use of right-wing humor as a political strategy; the normies will watch things which entertain them.

Second, right wing talking points are fairly mainstream. It's OK to be a normiecon in the public sphere; I saw this in a normal theater that was showing Betelgeuse and Alien: Romulus down the hallway. It doesn't seem to have been supercontroversial that Am I Racist? was getting released in normal theaters. I didn't see any protesters- and I went to see it in a not-white part of Dallas- and the ticket guy didn't care.

Third, Matt Walsh is clearly influential among normiecons. This film had a lot more money behind it than What is a Woman?, and the people backing normiecon advocacy are obviously willing to put themselves behind Walsh. This is important because Matt Walsh seems willing to at least try to push the overton window rightwards; it's possible that this is an early indicator of the partisan lines hardening tribally.

The Washington Post and the WSJ have op-eds praising the mockumentary. Which is actually especially surprising, as the entertainment sections on their websites, at least as of now (I just checked), have not a review or any article about it.

WP: "You might not enjoy ‘Am I Racist?’ You should watch it anyway."
https://archive.ph/9J7Ch

But what Walsh is actually revealing is two not-very-surprising realities of human nature: First, that every group has an awful fringe, and it’s easy to make that group look bad if only the fringe’s worst moments survive the cutting-room floor. Second, that the human instinct for avoiding confrontation is exploitable if you’re sufficiently willing to violate the social contract. Both points have already been amply demonstrated by a long history of cults and dictatorships, not to mention middle school.

Yet to give Walsh his due, it’s still jaw-dropping when participants in his ersatz diversity workshop sit silently, or even participate, as he berates a sick-looking elderly man in a wheelchair for being a racist. Walsh eventually stops the workshop when it seems as though they’re actually considering flagellating themselves with the whips he’s passing out.

At every point, his targets are visibly uncomfortable with his exaggerated behavior and strange ideas. But our instinct for avoiding confrontation is almost overwhelming, which both leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and keeps us from killing each other over trivia. If possible, we try to sidestep people who misbehave, not change them.

That’s especially true among America’s genteel upper middle class, who have an unusual ability to engineer their lives away from people who are annoying, antisocial or just plain weird. Many of the most embarrassing moments come in situations — small groups in small rooms — where it’s hard to get up and leave without causing a scene.

[…]

I dropped my head into my hands as DiAngelo went scurrying for her wallet, though I confess, I also laughed. Because you can’t help think of how many times DiAngelo has been paid for her advice on how White people ought to interact with people of color. And some of that advice is only slightly less bizarre and patronizing than suggesting we haul out our wallets and tip them $20.

WSJ: "Matt Walsh’s Hilarious New Film Asks: ‘Am I Racist?’"
https://archive.is/PMYka

An assessment of the DEI literature, published in the Harvard Business Review in 2012, was titled, “Diversity Training Doesn’t Work.” According to the article, one study of “829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had ‘no positive effects in the average workplace’ ” and that millions of dollars were spent annually on “training resulting in, well, nothing. Attitudes—and the diversity of the organizations—remained the same.”

Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev reached a similar conclusion in a 2018 academic paper. They noted that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.” According to the authors, “two-thirds of human resources specialists report that diversity training does not have positive effects, and several field studies have found no effect of diversity training on women’s or minorities’ careers or on managerial diversity.”

But what Walsh is actually revealing is two not-very-surprising realities of human nature: First, that every group has an awful fringe, and it’s easy to make that group look bad if only the fringe’s worst moments survive the cutting-room floor.

Not having watched this film yet (I intend to at some point due to the generally positive reviews from across the political spectrum - I'm not particularly familiar with Walsh and have no interest in What is a Woman, though I've seen his name and face* on social media second hand), this sentence went a wildly different direction than I thought it would go based on what I'd heard of the film. What I would have written would have been something more like:

First, that every group has an awful fringe, and therefore it's incumbent on every group not to subvert their ability to discriminate against and excise this awful fringe, lest they empower that fringe and cause awfulness to happen.

Because one thing that's clear about the movements behind the types of activists that are being mocked in this film is that they subvert this ability in many ways, e.g. by valuing an argument based on the race of the arguer rather than the quality of the arguments, which have enabled both cynical grifters and naive true believers to form an awful fringe that gets glossed over at least and institutional backing at worst. It seems like the original sentence was meant to call out Walsh as acting badly by shining a light at this awful result of this incompetent-at-best/malicious-at-worst behavior by these movements rather than calling out the very things that caused the awful result in the first place.

The second part also has a somewhat similar phenomenon going on; exploiting the human instinct for avoiding confrontation was a major means by which these awful fringes became as popular and influential as they did, which is what even allowed Walsh to have content upon which to base this film in the first place.

* I gotta say, if I hadn't heard of Walsh before I saw his face, I would have guessed that his ideology was the exact opposite of what it actually seems to be. Which, I guess, probably made it a lot easier for him to blend in while filming this.

I gotta say, if I hadn't heard of Walsh before I saw his face, I would have guessed that his ideology was the exact opposite of what it actually seems to be. Which, I guess, probably made it a lot easier for him to blend in while filming this.

He literally disguised himself while filming this.

I don't "trust" Matt Walsh. He's exactly the kind of controlled opposition boomercon who would lean into DR3 fail takes and decry the left for its racism and prejudice.

Do you think we're going to get to a world where elected officials say "HBD is true actually and that's why blacks underperform". I really don't think so. I'm not even sure we should, although it would be better if people could understand it without necessarily saying it.

The 1990s race blind society was a good Schelling point. I think we can and should go back there.

And Matt Walsh is incredibly brave. It takes a lot of guts to make a movie like this. I trust him not to cuck a lot more than I would someone who needs good standing from the elites such as Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney.

Hell, the guy went on Joe Rogan and said straight up that marriage is between a man and a woman and is for the purpose of procreation. He sticks to his guns.

The 1990s race blind society was a good Schelling point. I think we can and should go back there.

As I’ve pointed out a million times before, it was not a good Schelling point, because it was inherently unstable. It required a massive, society-wide coordinated effort to pretend not to notice something that’s obvious. And more specifically, it required black people to participate in that coordination, and to sacrifice a huge amount psychologically as a result. This is a culture with multigenerational stories of (what they consider) grievous mistreatment that has never been made right, and which (as they see it) is directly responsible for the profound differences in achievement and prestige between themselves and other racial groups.

In their minds, white people spent 400 years playing the racial identity politics game and cheating egregiously at it, and then the second blacks had a window where they could have attained parity (let alone the upper hand) whites decided that it was no longer okay to see race, that game is over with, we should just let bygones be bygones.

A plurality of blacks were willing to temporarily accept this new paradigm because they earnestly believed that, given a procedurally (if not materially) level playing field, blacks would inevitably start to move toward parity with whites. Thirty years later that absolutely has not happened, and shows no signs of even getting closer to happening. Why on earth would blacks accept the same “return to colorblindness” when it manifestly did not produce tangible results for them? It was built on a lie. HBD-aware whites disagree with blacks about what exactly that lie was, but neither side fails to recognize that it was indeed a lie.

Racial grievances have more to do with the fanning of racial grievances than with actual grievances. Or, put it another way, blacks seemed happier about their status in the 1990s than they do today, even though today they benefit from much greater affirmative action.

People are bound to notice that blacks do worse in society. Here is the menu of choices for how to deal with this problem. I think there's a clear winner.

  1. Blacks do worse because they have lower IQ on average (this is the truth, but I just don't think it's something that can be accepted by black people if explicitly said).
  2. Ignore the problem (this is the 1990s solution)
  3. Blacks do worse because of terrible racism in society. Until blacks do just as well as whites we have to tear down every structure of society. (We are here).

In an ideal world we'd be at #2. Scientists and policy makers would understand that #1 is the truth but it's not super polite to talk about it.

Don't want #2? Well, I hope you've enjoyed the last 10 years of racial grievance politics. Because the next stop is Brazil then South Africa.

Unfortunately, ignoring the problem is not stable, because there will always be someone who breaks the taboo and blames racism. Which means that explanations like (1) (which include "culture" as well as HBD, the common element being that the problem lies with blacks, not whites) must remain, if not on the table, at least at the ready to respond to such violations. There's no static equilibrium but there can be a dynamic one... but not if you allow the supertaboo of racism to cover all (1)-style explanations.

If the elite can be convinced of HBD, then they can punish people who break norms. So, yeah, I guess the ideal would be to convert the elite and then feed race blind pablum to the masses.

A free society will always have race baiters like Cornel West and Al Sharpton. But in the 1990s, it felt like the damage caused by these people was more contained.

But in the 1990s, it felt like the damage caused by these people was more contained.

You mean the decade of the Rodney King riots, “superpredator” discourse, and OJ Simpson?

Yep. It was actually pretty great. At the start of the decade, crime was near all-time highs thanks to 2 decades of urban decay and lax law enforcement.

A tough-on-crime approach put so many murderers in jail that the murder rate fell by nearly 50%. Many major cities like New York saw even larger gains with a corresponding urban renewal that (temporarily) stemmed the white flight to the suburbs.

Had the policies of the 1990s been allowed to persist until today, the U.S. would have the lowest murder rate in 100 years, maybe ever.

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No, In an ideal world we would be at a point where racial Difference in IQ are acknowledged and an attempt is made to "help out" the underperformers. (Affirmative action without the pretense of "systemic racism" and without scapegoating whitey for failure to achieve).

Further the affirmative action would be scaled by "personal" IQ so you would be able to help out white trash/trailer park dwellers at the same time.

The problem with affirmative action is that most jobs aren't just sinecures meant to provide someone with a socially approved level of status and monetary support; they are shit that actually needs to get done, and shoving an 85-IQ black guy into the civil engineering position in the name of equality is going to fuck up your building. Generalize, and the more affirmative action you have, the more you fuck up your economy and your government.

Welfare/UBI doesn't that have problem, but it has the alternate problem that unearned wages destroy people. Freed from the responsibility to work for a living, they revert back to pathological r-selection, like Spiegelman's monster. The males compete for women based on who can be the biggest thug rather than who can be the best provider; the women compete for males based on who can be the most sexually available rather than who can be the best mother. You get generation after generation of single mothers and criminals who think of welfare not as charity for which they should be grateful, but as a their entitled birthright.

The best solution is to just admit the truth about HBD, do nothing to promote equality, and let blacks carve out the best lives they can on the idea that everyone can contribute to society thanks to comparative advantage. But in order do that, you need to get rid of things like the minimum wage and zoning that forbid people from making a living if their productivity is not high enough.

And if black envy stoked by race hustlers is never going to accept that they are going to end up on the lower end of society through no fault of white's own, then the only alternative is physical separation. Let the blacks have their own country (carved out of Southern states, most likely) and let the whites have their own country, and never the twain shall meet.

When encountering HBD for the first time, this sort of thing was also my conclusion on what a good, fair system would work like. From what I can tell, one of the most prominent mainstream faces of HBD, Charles Murray, largely follows the same reasoning, leading to him supporting UBI (which isn't IQ-based affirmative action, but is meant to alleviate some of the same problems, by guaranteeing that no matter how bad you are at making money due to any reason, including low intelligence, you have some guaranteed income you can depend on for survival).

This is one reason why I find the argument that HBD needs to be suppressed, lest people use it to justify racism. Believing that belonging to a race that happens to have average high IQ or even having high IQ oneself entitles one to greater rights and privileges than those who don't happen to belong to such a race or don't happen to have high IQ is something separate and distinct from believing that different races have different average IQ, and the latter doesn't cause the former.

blacks seemed happier about their status in the 1990s than they do today

Did they? I wasn't watching the news back then, but Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson seem to have had a lot of racial grievances then, to the point of starting racial pogroms targeting Koreans and Jews.

Yes, I think so. I don't have data from the 1990s, but in 2001 70% of black adults were satisfied with race relations in America. That persisted until 2013 before collapsing to just 33% by 2021. Thanks Obama?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx

The best way to improve race relations is to stop talking about it so damn much.

The added irony is that the election of Obama was sold at least in part as the final nail in the 'The U.S. is racist" coffin by accepting a black president over another stodgy white guy.

Like the symbolic importance was there, even if we grant that not all racism would evaporate and in fact certain racists would be inflamed by his election.

The lesson that instead seems to have been imparted is "IDENTITY POLITICS ARE EFFECTIVE!" and Obama himself ended up fanning racial animosity. I had such a turning point at the Cool Clock, Ahmed moment where he intentionally brought attention to a trumped up racial incident on the side of the grifters.

We sure felt (to me) ready to move 'past' deep racial grievance as a nation circa 2010, but I fear that it has turned into a spectacular method of forcing others to do what you want, so sociopaths will of course leverage this as much as they can.

Remember: anyone who actually remembered what racism actually was retired by 2010 (assuming an age of 20 in 1950, they’d be 65 in 2015).

Thus there was nobody there to fact-check the sociopaths. Due to the conditions that enabled racism to be abolished not persisting, the sociopaths naturally re-instituted racism.

Guys like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were around but they were also well outside the mainstream, and widely mocked as racist grifters. Recall that Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright was actually seen as something of a scandal back in the day.

What about option 4: Political and geographic separation?

That's a stable equilibrium but there's not really a path from here to there ever since the American Colonization Society went bust.

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

Just learned that they only dissolved in 1964. That's surprisingly recent. I wonder who the last person who moved to Liberia was. Huge and obvious own goal.

In any case, if you look at trends in demographic movement, there is always movement away from black majority areas and to white majority areas. All racial groups want to be near whites. So you're not going to get segregation without violence. For me, I'll take 1990s race-blind society please.

In any case, if you look at trends in demographic movement, there is always movement away from black majority areas and to white majority areas. All racial groups want to be near whites.

Brookings claims otherwise, with blacks moving back to the South.

(makes me wonder if there is strife between the "returned" northerners and the southern blacks... my guess would be yes)

I'm not going to take the time to try to find taboo information on Google right now, but I recently saw data showing that when you look at Census blocks there is a huge correlation between white percentage and positive net migration (and the opposite for blacks).

This is obvious right? All the blackest cities in America are shedding population. All the exurbs are growing.

If a black person moves from Detroit to the Atlanta suburbs they are moving from a black area to a white one. "The South" being used as a stand-in for blackness is a blunt instrument and wrong.

Sounds like a race war-complete option. Alternatively, you can always geographically separate yourself on an individual basis.

Because the next stop is Brazil then South Africa.

We'll never be South Africa because we're never going to have a black majority.

Probably not, but there's a > 50% chance the world will be majority black by the end of century.

The population of Nigeria today is greater than the population of the entirety of Africa in 1950. Around 2060, Nigeria will surpass the population of the U.S. unless there are open borders.

And while Africa's growth rate is slowing, the developed world is slowing even faster.

So never say never.

In their minds, white people spent 400 years playing the racial identity politics game and cheating egregiously at it, and then the second blacks had a window where they could have attained parity (let alone the upper hand) whites decided that it was no longer okay to see race, that game is over with, we should just let bygones be bygones.

OK, I could have a number of objections to this description, but let's say it's mostly accurate. What's the alternative? Have 400 years of anti-white racism? Including against whites which had zero part in playing that game - either because they didn't have access to the benefits of the game, which weren't ever spread equally, as they aren't even in racially homogeneous societies, or because - which is very frequent case in America - their ancestors weren't even in America when the game has been played. Yet, somehow they need not to suffer for the sins of some dead people that share the skin hue with them? If not 400, how many years of racism is enough? How many years of racism would not create a completely broken culture integrating this racism and depending on it? How and who would decide that this is the moment we're even and now we can stop being racist to either side?

Let's look at human history. How the wars end? Sometimes they never do, but sometimes it happens. Do the warring sides carefully calculate who hurt whom, how many times, and hurt the other side back until the account is at precisely zero? Or do the decide, one day, that we should stop hurting each other, and whatever grievances we had in store, we are not going to hurt each other over them anymore? I think that's the only way to end a war. It may not please everyone, but I see no other way.

Let's say you say - that's not enough. For the fact that black businesses were refused loans at the racist times, nobody now can ever refuse a loan to a black-owned business. Would it make black businessmen more successful? I don't think so. First of all, any shrewd business would just hire a black person to do nothing but serve as a token - and that's not going to benefit genuine black-owned businesses and also would put a giant asterisk next to the name of every prominent black businessman. Second, banks either find a way to refuse loans they don't want to give, or will be forced to spread the risk - raising interest rates to everyone, and the weakest businesses would be those who will be hurt. Third, criminals sure will be attracted by the prospect of guaranteed loans, and honest businessmen will have trouble competing with crooks, since the banks would be forbidden from distinguishing between them, leaving to eventual washing out of honest business. So, did we improve the situation or did we make it worse?

Just stopping racism may be not satisfactory to many, but I don't see any way of stopping racism outside of stopping it. All other ways will just be hurting a lot of people and not improving anything.

If you’ve read my previous posting on race, you will already know my answer: racial separation of blacks and non-blacks. American blacks go their own way, and forge the best polity they can without the specter of racial wounds from the past weighing them down.

Black-white conflict will never cease in this country so long as blacks continue to lag so far behind other races, which will always be the case barring either a seismic shift in their culture and folkways, a highly effective application of eugenics, or some combination thereof. Since those things are extremely improbable, the alternative is separation.

We don’t have to keep having these fights into perpetuity. However, I think I’ve made a persuasive case that the peace terms you are proposing - unilateral disarmament by blacks, despite no structural changes that could plausibly lead to a future favorable outcome for them - are unrealistic and unsustainable.

American blacks go their own way,

Go their own way where? Liberia? I don't see them doing that voluntarily, why would they go to some shithole, they are as American as everybody else (and more than myself, a relatively fresh immigrant, for example). Or just ethnically purge Atlanta and ban whites from every coming in there? Why Atlanta then and not New York or Santa Monica? How that's supposed to work without destroying every principle of American society? I mean sure, if you imagined you are building a simulation from scratch, you could add a rule "black and whites live separately" and see if it works. But this simulation has already been running for a while, and I can't even begin to think that "their own way" would mean in this context. What if they think their own way is keep living in America, just as they did - does it mean whites have to get out?

Black-white conflict will never cease in this country so long as blacks continue to lag so far behind other races

I don't think it's true. A lot of countries have ethnically heterogeneous population, and a lot of countries have a lot of issues and concerns connected to that. But nowhere (at least not among developed countries) it's as central to literally everything as in America. And it is getting worse. Which also, paradoxically, means it is possible for it to be better - because it has been. And it has been deliberately made worse, for very practical partisan political reasons. If Americans, as a culture, find in themselves to sacrifice their partisan interests to their common culture interests, if they still want to make it better and not just to win over the other team, no matter the cost - it is possible for it to be better. Will it be all ok and nice? No. Shit's probably will be going on for decades, and there would be low-key racism and low-key hatred for a long time. But it can be much better than it is now, and the only thing that is really necessary if for people to want to make it better.

unilateral disarmament by blacks, despite no structural changes that could plausibly lead to a future favorable outcome for them

The only way there could be "future favorable outcome for them" is a racist regime actively (and by our current standards, absolutely outrageously) discriminating against people who are not them. Nothing less would make a dent. Even if that were possible, it may persist for one generation, while people who saw the reverse regime are still alive and still feel guilty for it. The next generation would not feel this guilt. They will inevitably demand justice. And then what? How do you give them justice? The only way you know?

Go their own way where? Liberia?

No, certainly not. The American Colonization Society - the last hope this country ever had of solving this issue once and for all - failed to seal the deal. Black Americans are not going to be deported to Africa. They would never do so willingly, and nobody would countenance the sort of coercive measures necessary to force them there against their will. I’m not advocating it, nor is anybody else.

No, the goal is simply to accelerate the process already taking place: blacks willingly consolidating their population in a handful of Southern states. This remigration is already taking place, and nobody is forcing anyone to do it. Blacks actually do want to live around their own people, when economic circumstances allow them to do so. Let them achieve such a supermajority in these places, along with strengthening the political domination they already have in most of the places I’m talking about, and then we can work on formalizing and reifying things from there.

Or just ethnically purge Atlanta and ban whites from every coming in there?

The ethnic purge of whites from the places I’m talking about has already happened. The white population of Atlanta proper is minuscule. The white presence in the suburbs can only hold for so long before whites do what they’ve always done in this country whenever blacks start to gather strength: move somewhere else. Whites will of course still be able to travel to Atlanta - just as I can travel to Toronto, or London, or Paris, or Shanghai. It’s just that the actual citizenship and the power that comes with it will be formally restricted to blacks. Atlanta will be a black city the way that Tokyo is a Japanese city, even though Tokyo contains thousands of non-Japanese visitors at any given time.

But nowhere (at least not among developed countries) it's as central to literally everything as in America.

Right, the racial history of America really is unlike that of any other country on earth. No other country contains a population of this size which is still visually and culturally this distinct and which is only in the country as a direct result of centuries of chattel slavery and subjugation. Other countries have minority populations with grievances against the empowered majority - First Nations in Canada, Aboriginals in Australia, even the Ainu in Japan - but none of them have anything remotely like the power and numbers that American blacks have. (The closest comparison, I suppose, would be the Māori in New Zealand.)

Which also, paradoxically, means it is possible for it to be better - because it has been

When? When was it better? People can literally only point to a roughly 15-year period. In the entire 400 years of black-white relations in the history of this country, we’ve had not even twenty years of sustained peace. (And even this period saw its share of flare-ups.) This does not paint the picture you think it does.

Blacks are not mere puppets of powerful partisan operators that can toggle levels of racial grievance up and down with a magical dial. They are responding to reality as they perceive it, which is informed by their actual lived experiences. They correctly perceive that whites largely do not like them, do not want to live around them, and would coordinate to take harsh action against a large portion of the black population if offered a roadmap to do so.

Hell, the halcyon days of the 90’s and 00’s you wish to depict as a colorblind success was also the time when by far the largest proportion of the black population was incarcerated. That was the only way to maintain the illusion of peace! By literally locking away the most execrable 10% of the black male population out of the sight of white people for a decade. The second blacks started successfully agitating against mass incarceration and the worst elements of the black population were once again thrust out in front of whites’ eyes, that’s when race relations fell apart again.

But it can be much better than it is now, and the only thing that is really necessary if for people to want to make it better.

Oh! What an idea! This whole time, I’ve been trying to make things worse! Why did nobody consider trying to make it better?!

We’ve tried everything in the book to make it better. We’ve tried everything from Jim Crow segregation, to colorblindness, to affirmative action and No Child Left Behind, to active anti-white discrimination. We’ve tried mass incarceration and mass de-incarceration. The one thing that never got fully implemented along racial lines was eugenics, but it’s not like many intelligent and important people (both white and black) didn’t discuss it. (Look into what W.E.B. Dubois had in mind as far as that was concerned.) I’m not going to say that none of it has made a dent. That would be dishonest. But you yourself admit that it hasn’t made anywhere near enough of a difference. What fresh new solutions do you propose, beside sweeping this stuff under the rug and praying really hard that nobody notices the lump?

Go their own way where?

I disagree fundamentally with some of @Hoffmeister25's axioms, but in the formulation of the problem he's more or less straightforwardly correct. Blacks will never accept being an underclass any more than whites would, and there is no reason to believe that any solutions inside the Overton window can actually extricate them from their underclass status.

As for solutions, here's a modest proposal I wrote awhile back. As a list of things that are never going to happen, I think there's much to commend it.

I have previously proposed Reverse-Segregation: give blacks an area that they control completely, where every public official and government position must be held 100% by black people, by law. Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit, irrespective of the American constitution, and grant it leave to enforce and adjudicate those laws as it sees fit, completely outside the jurisdiction of the rest of American jurisprudence. Fund it with a per-capita percentage of all outlays legitimately payable to black Americans equivalent to the percentage of black Americans who actually live within it. People, white or black, can move there if they want, and leave if they want; no one can be kept there against their will, and no law-abiding citizen be prevented from going there by the rest of America if they choose to go. Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else. No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law. Race-based discrimination is equally illegal no matter which race it's applied to. If certain words are evidence of bias, they're evidence regardless of who speaks them. Claims of bias will no longer be entertained unless they come with ironclad evidence. And if anyone doesn't like this, there's a place they can move. Welfare can even continue outside the zone as well, we just use cellphone data to track who's inside and who's outside and apportion the money appropriately. Anyone not-black who wants to can move inside the zone, they just can't hold office or vote for anyone who isn't black, presuming the zone decides to keep voting. Maybe even throw in something about the zone expanding if its population rises too high.

I think Hoff would not be wildly enthused with a plan like that, but I wonder if he'd take it. I wouldn't be wildly enthused for it either, and my expectation is that the zone would either turn into a corrupt shithole or what many now would consider a draconian police state in fairly short order. The idea of enforcing "racism is over" outside the zone is likewise laughably unrealistic; blues will never, ever let that weapon be pried from betwixt their fingers.

In any case, I think he's right that the colorblind 90s aren't coming back. Some problems don't have acceptable solutions. We can in fact keep right on burning social cohesion trying to bail water with sieves until things actually fall apart in a serious enough way to leave us with more pressing concerns.

Blacks will never accept being an underclass any more than whites would,

True, and that's why the only solution is to abandon the framework where the measure of equality is the equality of statistical outcomes between races (or any other large population-wide categories, for that matter). This framework is not something that is inevitable and it's not something that is necessary. I don't care how many people who have the same eye color as me and the same nose length as me are rich and how many are poor. I care if I'm rich or poor, I care about whether my family and my friends are rich or poor. I care about whether I could be prevented from being richer or made poorer by unjust means. But wide-area statistical frameworks are meaningless to me - unless they are made meaningful by adopting them as political and cultural framework that is dominant in the society. There's no inherent reason why US should have adopted the racial framework. To be an "underclass" you should first be a "class", and "classes" are entirely arbitrary. Stop obsessing about them and the problem will be gone.

give blacks an area that they control completely

Who are "they"? Any man that can prove a drop of African blood? That's much more people than you think. What happens to other people living there, if they don't want to live in the racist paradise? What does it mean "control completely" - does it secede from the US? What happens to people that want to keep living in the US and keep being US citizens and keep having US laws? I don't see why for example a black professor at local university would suddenly want to subject himself to a regime that may not be able to sustain any universities at all. Doesn't he have any rights?

Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit

Areas can't write laws. People write laws. Who will be choosing these people? Will it be mass combat or lottery or how are you planning to choose those people? What if there would be 10 groups of people writing ten competing sets of laws - which group is the real one that gets the full control? How this control would be enforced - will US army and police participate if armed conflict happens? Will it blockade the area if there would be threat of violence spreading out? What about if they decide to build a giant meth factory and ship it to the US? Or even much worse, a giant generic drugs factory, without respecting any US drug patents? Will there be a complete trade embargo?

Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else

They already have this status, why we need the racist paradise to achieve what we already have?

No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law.

Again, we can do it right now - why we need the racist paradise? What if the blacks don't want to live in the racist paradise, but want to keep living in New York and California, only better than they live now? I'm not sure what exactly having the racist paradise zone achieves. If you have a mechanism that can stop the racial grievances, I don't see why you can't use it without that, and if you don't have that mechanism, what did you achieve then?

I think he's right that the colorblind 90s aren't coming back

The past is never coming back, but we're coming into the future, and it can be made better than the present, if there's a will.

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Do you think we're going to get to a world where elected officials say "HBD is true actually and that's why blacks underperform"[?]

I suppose that depends on how much progress we make in genetic engineering.

I really have no idea what you mean. What is DR3? What are you saying in plain language?

DR3 means "Democrats are the real racists".

Why?

Democrats are the real racists = Democrats R the Real Racists = DRRR = DR^3 = DR3

Wait, you might not be asking how the weird abbreviation works. You might be asking why people believe that Democrats are racist.

I think that the change that has happened in my life time starts from the position that Black underperformance is due to anti-black racism from whites. End racism, replacing it with meritocracy and Blacks will thrive and do just as well as Whites.

After forty years of disappointment, the new-Democrat anti-racist position is that blacks are inferior, so meritocracy condemns them to an inferior position in society. Therefore meritocracy is bad and must be rejected in favor of racial quotas to ensure that blacks are given equal outcomes to whites. new-Democrats don't word it like that. DR3 is that claim that that is what they mean and it is really racist and bad.

Nah, I was asking about the mechanics of the abbrevation. Thanks!!

No idea

Matt Walsh is not a based aryan race warrior. But there will never be one of public prominence again. Like it or not, the country doesn’t support racism.

If Walsh can push the Overton window rightwards without scaring the hoes, that is a good thing.

I really don't get some people's problem with DR3, unless you want to go full-MurdochMurdoch and say "No, goddammit, we are!"

Goofy IDW psy-ops like "the woke right" are a much bigger issue, and I don't see him participating in that.

DR3 is true but useless. Similar to how Republicans control "patriotism" the Dems are in firm control of defining who is or isn't racist, who is or isn't gay, etc. It's how Biden can get away with saying if you don't vote for him you aren't black, leftists saying Peter Thiel isn't really gay, etc. Doesn't matter if it's true because it has effectively zero effect on the median normie's perception of the issue.

What ever happened to "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be"

Oh I agree with that completely, and we should continue to proclaim the truth that Democrats are the real racists. But as a political and campaigning strategy etc. it's ineffective at best.

The falsehood that Dems are not racist hasn't been destroyed by the truth that they are, because they have enough cultural and other power to protect themselves from that truth.

The problem with DR3 is that pointing it out doesn't work. Normies won't believe it because the Democrats are the party of Not Being Racists no matter how racist they actually are.

No, the problem with DR3 is that “racism” isn’t a bad thing. Being aware of racial differences, and acting on that awareness, is an entirely healthy behavior within reason. If the Democrats were “the real racists” - meaning they were willing to openly acknowledge HBD and outline ways to address it - I’d be way more likely to vote for them.

If that's what it's about, than it's the last I want to hear of "buying into your enemies' framing". Noticing differences is not racism.

What do you think racism is?

A belief in inherent collective inferiority of a particular group, to the point of ignoring any individual characteristics that contradict that belief about the collective. Broadly, because I can imagine examples that aren't about inferiority, strictly speaking.

This seems like it’s designed to exclude basically every modern instantiation of what every racially-aware person today believes. Like, if you’re not a Madison Grant level “Africa begins at Calais” Nordicist TND advocate, you’re not a racist? What does “inferiority” mean in this context? What percentage of blacks do I need to believe are “exceptions to the rule” before I’m no longer a racist? (W.E.B. Dubois, one of the great black thought leaders in American history, spoke of “the talented tenth” of blacks needing to paternalistically care for the other 90% of them who are not cognitively capable of measuring up to Western civilization. Was Dubois racist against black people?)

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What does "ignoring any individual characteristics that contradict that belief about the collective" mean? If I meet a few Jews with short noses but don't change my belief that Jews collectively have longer than average noses, am I being racist?

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Even if it's ineffective, "controlled opposition" sounds like he's someone working to ensure no one walks off the reservation. If that's the case, what is supposed to lie beyond DR3?

what is supposed to lie beyond DR3

Yes chadding and tactical minimization of the power of "racism" as a concept. When the enemy controls the plains you fight in the mountains.

Is "DR3" false? and if it is true should we not decry them?

Is "DR3" false? and if it is true should we not decry them?

Its veracity isn't particularly important. It's fighting the war on their term and a vain attempt to signal virtue to a crowd that already hates you. It's also a self-own. This is one of the reasons I hate the cuckservatives with a burning passion.

Its veracity isn't particularly important

Do you value the truth or don't you?

They own the word "racism", and they define it as they please. That definition will never, ever favor Reds, regardless of the circumstances, and regardless of the facts.

If you have concerns about how black people or whoever are treated, that's fair enough. Decide for yourself what is right, argue your points with others, do what seems right to you. But if, in your mind, winning involves getting to apply the label "racism" in what seems to you a proper way, you have already lost.

Do you value the truth?

Do you find it rational to commit to suicide pacts that one side has no intention on following through with?

Who is commiting suicide?

Makes it sound like a bit of a cross between Borat and Bowling for Columbine.

While ultimately I think it isn't going to move the front of the Culture War forward because calling the left out on hypocrisy and lack of principles doesn't inflict much material damage, at least it shows the right how to fight.

Having seen B4C without knowing Michael Moore back in the day, I’d agree with how the vibe/humor of this film is a rough analogue.

I posted a while back about Canada, its housing crisis, and the political implications, but I want to talk a bit more about the biggest social/political trend in Canada recently: temporary residents.

In 2024Q2 Canada had 3 million temporary residents, amounting to 7% of our national population. Over half of this total arrived since 2020. I say it all the time, but it is hard to appreciate the speed and scale of this change. Canada was 73% white in 2016, 69% in 2021, and is about 61% now. The share of Canada's resident population from South Asia is only a few percentage points lower than the black share in the U.S. It was only 4% in 2006. Temporary resident inflows plus our normal immigration stream which is among the highest on earth had led to population growth of over 3% per year since the pandemic.

This has put huge strain on our housing market of course which is now among the least affordable on earth. However, one underappreciated implication of this migration is the impact on labour markets. The arrivals are disproportionately low skill and compete with young Canadians. Over the past year as economic growth has slowed significantly, unemployment has begun to rise (now 6.6%) but for 15-24 year olds its nearly 20%.

Housing unaffordability remains near all time highs. We now have 2023 crime statistics showing another increase and erasing all progress since the late 1990s. Canada's total fertility rate data for 2023 came out last week and shows a big drop to 1.26 -- the lowest ever recorded and well below peer countries.

Young Canadians are now 58th most happy in the world. Old Canadians are 8th.

The country continues to circle the drain.

It's gotten really, really bad lately. I visited my family in Nova Scotia over the summer and I was just completely stunned at how utterly the demographics of my small rural hometown had changed, even over just the last decade. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every service worker I interacted with was Indian, Pakistani, or some other flavor of subcontinental. This in a town of ~4000 that was 97% white in 2001. Both of the local pizza joints which I fondly remember from my childhood have been sold to immigrants and the staff completely replaced. I haven't really looked into it, but as I understand it most of these workers are not strictly immigrants, they're there on some kind of education visa that allows them to work (and allegedly businesses are subsidized for hiring them -- not sure how accurate that is, but it's what locals are claiming.) There have always been "temporary foreign workers" involved in agriculture but the recent changes are just categorically different. (Professionals such as doctors and other medical specialists have also been mostly sourced from India for a while, but there were generally fewer complaints about that.)

Property prices have also increased commensurately, but none of the homeowners I spoke with felt particularly "enriched" because the increase is basically global and even if they cashed out there's nowhere else to move to. Some own lakeside cottages that they plan to retreat to; most aren't so lucky.

The mood is generally quite dour. I don't think anyone expected such a rapid demographic change was even possible, and it doesn't seem like something they can vote their way out of.

The premier of Nova Scotia wants to double the population of the province by 2060. To achieve that would require immigration like NS has seen over the past 3 years repeated at the same level for the next 35. And he's the conservative.

It would be wrong to break down the way Canadian politics operates with respect to immigration as a conservative/liberal split. It is more coherently a young vs old dynamic, and somewhat even more pointedly people who own property vs people who don't.

Up until very recently there was a very strong national pro-immigration consensus across pretty much the entire political spectrum and all demographics, with the one exception being a fringe national party (People's Party). Canada was by a decent margin the most welcoming country to new immigrants and perceptions of the immigration system in general were strongly favourable. This was I think in part a reflection that the system itself was well-designed: priority to well-off, educated immigrants who spoke either national language.

The capital "I" immigration rate has gone up, but people don't really have a problem with this. More concerning to Canadians has been the growth in other types of migrants: international students, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers/refugees. It's these categories that have driven the massive increases in population. For example in 2023 the breakdown was 477k new immigrants (i.e., foreign nationals offered permanent residence) and ~ 1.3 million "temporary" residents.

While the federal Liberals have certainly enabled and to a large part driven the abuse of these other flows of migration, they have not been the only bad actors. Provincial conservative-run governments have absolutely followed them in this race to rebuild Punjab in Canada. Together they have in the course of about two years absolutely destroyed the national consensus on immigration.

I think the pre-2015 immigration consensus was only partly to do with selectivity. The numbers were still high, but they went overwhelmingly to large cities that were already multicultural— especially their large suburbs. It was possible to live in Canada from 2000 to 2015 say and not perceive the rapid changes because they were occurring in Brampton. And critically, because they were so concentrated and numbers not insane, housing could respond. As recently as 2015, housing outside of the top 3 metros wasn’t just affordable it was cheap.

Now it’s everywhere. Every small town. Every neighborhood.

Yeah, I had a similar experience to you going back home last month and finding out the old hairdressing place I went to as a kid is now all Indians. And the grocery store I went to as a kid is all Indians. Etc. etc. I live in a very diverse part of Toronto so it's not like I'm easily shocked or whatever. Hell, even in my neighbourhood we're a lot different than three years ago, because the Filipinos and Chinese and African immigrants have been shunted out by Indians too. My brother-in-law who lived in Toronto for a decade was very surprised when he came back this year, and remarked how Toronto feels so much less diverse now that Indians are forming a new pseudo-majority in many neighbourhoods or employment sectors.

In my personal life I engage with a lot of well-off Torontonians, the type who have historically been among the most pro-Liberal (capital L) and pro-immigration. They have up until recently been insulated from the effects of immigration while benefiting enormously from higher property values and depressed wages. It's finally creeping up on them too: it's car thefts and the fact that their kids (like high-school, university age) can't get jobs. There are no typical student jobs left anymore. McDonalds? Grocery store? Retail? Forget it. There are a dozen people from Punjab for every Canadian kid, and they will put up with a lot more shit. These well-off Canadians are finally starting to realize they've created a country that is hostile to their children.

And that’s why I’m so terrified about the current election in the states. It seems like if the Dems win, then permanent demographic change (with one party state).

In principle the natives could vote out the politicians and pursue a deportation strategy. But the natives while firmly being anti migration are slightly more divided compared to the unified group of new voters.

Isn’t permanent demographic change already inevitable? In 1950, the United States was 89.5% white, 10% black, and 0.5% other. By 2000, the U.S. was 75.1% white, 12.3% black, and 12.6% other. As of 2020, the United States is 61.6% white (57.8% non-Hispanic white), 12.4% black, and 26% other. You can see stats on other years here. Today, every age group under 25 is now less than 50% non-Hispanic white. There’s no reversing that.

Today, every age group under 25 is now less than 50% non-Hispanic white. There’s no reversing that.

Not with that attitude!

Yes, but the magnitude matters. America becoming ~45% non-Hispanic white and 25% Hispanic is baked in now.

However, keep legal plus illegal immigration at 3 million plus for another generation and the demographic shares will continue to shift (toward more black and Asian specifically). It will be very different from current no matter what, but how different is tbd.

Yes, but the magnitude matters. America becoming ~45% non-Hispanic white and 25% Hispanic is baked in now.

Yeah, but that means an overall white majority, because many of those Hispanics are white.

...as are blacks who vote Republican if NBC and Joe Biden are to believed.

There’s no reversing that.

Fully, no, but I'd be interested in statistics on what the racial makeup would look like if the 20 or 30 biggest cities got deleted; my eyeball says they tend somewhat more minority (especially black).

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

Looks like we'd lose a lot of our Asians, but just eyeballing the list there'd be plenty of large black and Hispanic populations left.

"If we get nuked at least we'd have got rid of some blacks" is certainly one of the takes.

I'm really just curious what kind of a train of thought led you to that.

"If we get nuked at least we'd have got rid of some blacks" is certainly one of the takes.

I'm making an Is statement, not an Ought statement.

I'm really just curious what kind of a train of thought led you to that.

Nuclear war is on my mind a fair bit, especially right now since October's a good month for amphibious invasion of Taiwan and the USA has a known demented President and an election campaign in progress that's seen a disqualification attempt and two assassination attempts already (and the election being a shitshow was predictable years in advance). So when somebody makes a statement that seems to discount nuclear war as a possibility, it pings my "someone is wrong on the internet" instinct.

Probably—but it can get worse.

Isn't the issue that Canadian doctors & especially nurses move to the US ?

And why wouldn't they? Identical culture, no further than Canadian cities are from each other and an immediate 2-3x pay bump.

Same applies to Tech & Finance. Canada is facing the exact same problem as middle America. All jobs are in the regional economic hub. Not enough young to run these small towns, because the young are leaving. Those regional hubs are in Coastal USA : primarily California and the NE corridor. A Nova Scotian is both physically and culturally closer to New England, than many American states are to each other.

staff completely replaced

We're the previous staff out of a job or did they more to better things ?

I don't want to make it sound like I'm make light of what's clearly a drastic change. Seems like the locals didn't want it. And small towns can't sustain their existing culture in the face of such rapid change. I empathize.

One question. How do these towns of 4000 survive in the first place ?

Nova Scotia is the world's largest exporter of Christmas trees, lobster, gypsum, and wild berries

Sounds like a low skill resource based economy. It doesn't sound like immigrants are coming in to take the jobs. Sounds more blue-collar owners have stopped working, and started delegating. Canadians aren't reproducing. The few young are leaving for urban areas. Someone has to catch the fish and cut the trees. IMO, might as well be immigrants. I understand if people don't want immigrants. But, are there any young locals to do these jobs at all ? How do you think these villages would survive otherwise ?

North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.

Canada is facing the worst of it because of the immigration tsunami and a shoddy economy. But, that's like blaming the rain for leaks, when you've got a gaping hole in your roof. Any place in the world would be affected just as adversely, if housing policy was this hostile. Sydney & Honolulu are 2 such examples. It's tempting to think you can trudge along like coastal US cities. But, coastal USA gets around it through sheer brute force. The economies of coastal USA can sustain any level of dysfunction. Be it California's $100b HSR or NYC renting out the whole city's hotels as refugee shelters. Other places aren't so fortunate.

Canada needs to build a shit ton of housing ASAP. The country has practically infinite lumber and just imported a ton of low skill labor. Put up some 4+1s and this will be solved in under a year.

There is no mincing words. Canada's shambolic housing policy is a wealth transfer program from the young to the old. Canada's economy is not doing great, and you'd expect it to affect everyone's QOL equally. Through this (almost direct) wealth transfer, the liberal govt. has decided to let the young bear all the misery, while the geriatrics have the world's greatest retirement.

P.S: I'm Indian and Canada's current immigration policy is a joke even within India. To quote Trump, "They’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us". India's best don't aspire to go to Canada. They go to the US, Urban India or Western Europe. The OP talks about housing costs and Canada's wider problems with productivity. I'll stick to that. Can always talk about immigration later.

North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means for expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.

YIMBY may be associated with the Left and all its social dysfunctions and annoyance these days, but the economic consensus on this one preceded the Left's adoption of YIMBY. Pretty much the only dissent you see, academically, is from the further Left, who ultimately wants only publicly owned housing and is offended by the sheer existence of market rate housing and, even then, their work sucks.

A century and a half ago, NYC had more than a million utterly impoverished immigrants dumped on it when the city and the immigrants were vastly poorer than they are today. This was no problem, from a housing perspective: They threw up a bunch of apartments and tenements and housing stayed under 15% of even the very low income of those immigrants.

In practice, it tends to be republicans who 'just build shit', though. They choose to screw over trees rather than existing homeowners in most cases, but build housing they do.

Some historically conservative states (mostly in the South) are pretty good about Just Building. Montana is probably the best example of a state which has recently reformed its laws to make it easier to Just Build, and they're pretty much a former red-tinged swing state.

So yeah, not wrong.

A century and a half ago there wasn't welfare, was precious little in the way of building codes, and forget about occupancy codes -- the immigrants were crammed into those tenements.

Yep. It can be done, even when we were so much poorer 150 years ago. We could make something safer today, no doubt, for the vastly smaller numbers of people via our overall population and keep it affordable but we have, in addition to much greater wealth, much greater numbers of 'building codes'.

Houston has no zoning. In practice, it has some rules. But the lack of formal zoning limits how stringent it can be- and it comes at a cost. Unlike other cities, where there's a 'ghetto', separated from 'a decent neighborhood' by industrial zones or housing for salt of the earth types, and functionally all the crime is in the former, Houston makes up for its relatively cheap housing with evenly spread crime throughout the entire city, rather than concentrating it all in one district.

There's tradeoffs everywhere. Zoning doesn't exist primarily to screw young people- concentrating low-income housing in one spot has benefits.

Unlike other cities, where there's a 'ghetto', separated from 'a decent neighborhood' by industrial zones or housing for salt of the earth types, and functionally all the crime is in the former,

There's plenty of cities where the ghetto is separated from decent neighborhoods by perhaps one city block or even less. Crucially, you can't ensure that an area becomes a ghetto by building an apartment there, and you can't guarantee an area is high income by zoning it for SFH. There's plenty of single family crack houses in Detroit on sale for about tree fiddy.

North American housing crises are manufactured.

Where (in the industrialised world) are they not?

Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.

Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.

Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.

But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.

Hong Kong’s housing crisis is also partially manufactured because the construction of new subway / MTR stations is extremely slow and most people want to live within close walking distance of one in a city that gets extremely hot and humid and which has typhoons on a regular basis. There’s actually a lot of empty land in Hong Kong that’s just mountainous (which they’re very familiar with building on).

Houston, Texas has as close to a completely free market on housing as anywhere in the industrialized world- it's still relatively affordable rather than absolutely so.

I happened to speak with two Canadians this month and in both cases housing was brought up. One told me that there were too many immigrants arriving too fast but that their country of origin was immaterial, and in any case Canadians don’t have a right to complain because of the residential schools controversy. The other told me point blank there were way too many Indians arriving, that it is ruining the country and that they would vote for Trump if they lived in America. The former was a white Canadian of colonial stock and the latter was a first-gen Pakistani replete with accent.

Let’s say the resident school controversy was true. As best I can make out the logic, it is:

  1. Europeans came here and took land from the native population.

  2. Natives suffered as a result.

  3. As a descendent of those Europeans, I am morally responsible.

  4. Therefore it is a good thing if a new population comes here and harms the current natives (ie me).

It seems quite odd to me. First, it assumes generational guilt. And if that is true, then maybe the original natives “deserved” it. It also implies the new population while enacting justice is committing a wrong. Very confusing.

Adding to the confusion, only the guilt is transmitted forward through time. For some reason, none of the credit for building a first world country follows.

The same people saying "You must feel bad for the horrible things your ancestors did" will not even skip a beat before saying "you can't feel pride for the great things your ancestors achieved." So conveniently you can't assume any credit for creating a successful nation, but you get to feel blame for what happened to any minorities or natives who suffered during its creation, just in case you thought those two factors might balance out the ledger.

I am utterly unclear as to the mechanism that allows blame to propagate forward through time and generations but doesn't allow credit and pride to propagate as well.

I am utterly unclear as to the mechanism that allows blame to propagate forward through time and generations but doesn't allow credit and pride to propagate as well.

It's not about a mechanism. It's bullshit wordcelry.

The entire thing exists to harm what's left of the culture of your people and to deprive you of power. That was explicitly stated by the people who made it up, except nobody bothers to read marxist books but people paid to do so or lunatics. Trying to tease about the internal consistency of an ideology seeking your dispossession is just crazy.

Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution" goes about the genesis of that bullshit in excruciating, mind numbing details, it's also widely available.

I feel like Canadians used to be very smug about being a first world nation. America with +40% niceness and +20% multiculturalism basically.

I don't know what happened. My social circle has narrowed in terms of ethnic Anglo/native-born Canadians outside of a few at work and my media diet is extremely Americanized (and hyper-guilt driven) so maybe I don't see it as much (or people really are just tired after the recent migrant wave). On the other hand that may be true of Canadians themselves, which might explain the increased pessimism. Or whatever common factor drove the hope-and-change era around the time I arrived in both countries is just done everyone is now more pessimistic.

I am utterly unclear as to the mechanism that allows blame to propagate forward through time and generations but doesn't allow credit and pride to propagate as well.

Other countries didn't succeed in becoming first world nations because Canada/America/the West's success is based on their exploitation. Simple.

Other countries didn't succeed in becoming first world nations because Canada/America/the West's success is based on their exploitation. Simple.

Doesn't really work when you can see how Japan recover from nukes and occupation, or Singapore vaulting to first World status and becoming a beacon of civilization, with little apparent exploitation of other nations.

Works even less when you notice that places like Rhodesia and South America were pretty much first-world or close second-world countries right up until the Western influence withdrew.

I said it was simple, not that you would find it credible. But that's the argument.

You start giving counter-examples and you'll hear about Haiti's reparations, slaves building America, coups in LatAm, how India had X% of the world's GDP before Britain looted it, bad borders in Africa and the ME, sanctions against Zimbabwe meanwhile honorary white Japan (which was spared colonialism - somehow) was needed as a bulwark against the Soviets and so was treated relatively well. They have explanations, it's just a matter of how much you think they're cope (I've swung over to the "cope" side but I change most of my opinions an average of every eight years and I'm in the "converted zealot" stage and it's really not helpful for digging out nuance.)

It may not hold up but it's the closest thing to a coherent justification for the asymmetry I've seen.

You asked for some theory that would allow one and not the other, not just an explanation of nakedly self-serving behavior. I doubt anyone needs to hear "my opponents want me to believe things that help them and to avoid things that don't" from me.

No, I get that.

Its just every epicycle they have to add makes it less credible to me.

It is one thing to point to some guy who inherited wealth built on the backs of actual slaves or exploitation, and say that maybe he doesn't deserve everything he has.

Quite another to point at somebody who just happened to be born into a civilization that was built in part on the back of slaves and through exploitation of weaker neighbors, and claim that just because his ancestors bled, died, and labored to build a nation so nice that everybody wants to move there he doesn't get to be proud of himself... and he also should feel guilt for all the people that were exploited to build the nation (which includes his ancestors, mind!).

I've said it elsewhere, the lesson of politics since about 2010 is "identity politics and racial grievances are a great way to get others to do what you want and give you their stuff."

Of course the end state of this is leftists revolting against nature. It always is. Some nations were bequeathed huge stores of natural bounty, some were not, and this determined their future courses to some huge degree. The only way to correct for this is to move that natural bounty around until every place on earth can obtain some kind of parity.

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meanwhile honorary white Japan (which was spared colonialism - somehow)

When the threat of colonization became apparent, they built themselves up into a modern state.

Which itself is a rather good refutation of the nonsense theories about how the plight of the Third World is all due to the First World, but you'll never get anyone who believes it to change their mind.

Reading the actual history of the Meiji restoration, it seems to have been dependent on the samurai class producing vast numbers of geniuses engaged in pointless bureaucracy they could be pulled off of without anyone noticing. It would be like the Hasidim deciding collectively, overnight, that they need to build an industrial economy and so their best and brightest have to be moved off of torah study to learn chip design or whatever.

Most colonized societies didn't have anywhere near the ability to do this. If we assume the samurai class had the same IQ advantage over the commoners that college graduates do over the hoi polloi in the USA(probably an underestimate) we're looking at a class of people with an average IQ similar to Ashkenazi Jews, who had quite literally nothing to do so they were given sinecures commanding vast resources with enforcing social conservatism as their only responsibility, and a single point of authority to rally around when it was apparent times needed to change, and a pre-existing tradition of employing literal geniuses in copying western technology. Those ingredients were rare in isolation; together they existed only in Japan.

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Some of them hate whites, some of them are aware of the internal tension, and some of them see a sort of collective guilt that needs to be repaired by incorporating minorities into the broader structure of society.

ETA: there's also some revisionist pseudohistory about how blacks/natives/whatever really built the nice societies in question, but I don't think it's the dominant strain of thought.

It is honestly a weird self hatred

Well, if we did this to the Indians, it's only fair that the Indians get to do it to us.

More seriously, I think that especially among young Canadians, there is a sense that progressive policies have failed. As I write this, I'm walking by a sign advertising our local progressive party (The NDP). The sign sits in front of a number of tents containing the homeless (or "unhoused people"). 9 years ago, when I moved into this neighborhood, it was still not a good neighborhood, but there weren't visible crack pipes, dirty needles, or homeless people shrieking profanities all through the night. The BC NDP decriminalizing drugs has visibly led to an explosion in the homeless population and general appearance of decay.

I live in a rent controlled building. My rent is around $1200 CAD monthly, compared to what would be around $2700 CAD if I were to move in today. The progressive party has failed at keeping life affordable for the middle class (and their federal counterparts literally voted to keep increasing demand on housing.)

What I think has happened is that the youth have reached a point where it is literally impossible to survive with the progressive policies. The insulation that the standard progressive has against the negative repercussions of their policies has been worn away, and when they cry uncle, the government they elected doubles down on the policies hurting them.

It's easy to be progressive when it just means being nice. It's much harder when it means that you rent a tiny shoebox for the rest of your life, and can't start a family, or travel, or do anything but eck out an existence for the corporate overlords the progressives swear they opposed, but who somehow keep doing better and better. And all the while, the government keeps upping taxes, but somehow they're all gone by the time you're supposed to see them.

It’s quite interesting. In New Zealand, the leader of the anti-immigration party is a Maori. But Māori likely have more influence in New Zealand than the first nations do in Canada.

Canadians don’t have a right to complain because of the residential schools controversy

I hate the idea that the residential schools narrative (and narratives of similar nature) could be so effective. How do you even begin to deprogram such a person?

Maybe just callously adopting your local equivalent of 'Armenian genocide? made up nonsense, and they deserved it all anyway' is the meta. Admittedly I'm biased in that direction.

I mean, residential school mass graves are quite literally made up.

When the "graves" were dug up and showed that the interpretations of ground penetrating data were not evidence of graves, the narrative immediately pivoted to 'starting a conversation'.

Its the rallying cry of idiots caught with their pants down, and our mistake is thinking being caught out is a bad thing for these grifters. The point of a grift is attention. They don't need to be correct or right, just be the juiciest butt progressives can parasite their social media onto for self edification.

Have you guys heard of Welcome To Country? Its basically land acknowledgments but somehow cringier, performed in Australia everyfuckingwhere especially at government level. I am 100% sure they originated as a tokenistic way of fobbing off the concerns of 'indigenous' communities.

While the aussies seem largely uncaring or sick of this government grovelling, the Canadians have been absolutely enthralled by it. White Canadians drooling at the prospect of demonstrating their progressive credentials, to further set themselves apart from their brutal southern kins.

I honestly think the Canadians are going the way of the Scots. A funny accented people whose entire modern existence is defined by differentiating themselves as much as possible from their far more successful and relevant southern brothers, with an almost ironic fetishization of a local orange-brown liquid. Thankfully for the Canadians Maple Syrup is actually good, unlike that disgusting abomination Irn-Bru.

Thankfully for the Canadians Maple Syrup is actually good,

How dare you try to appropriate what rightfully belongs to the Green Mountain State!

While the aussies seem largely uncaring or sick of this government grovelling

Depends on the Aussie. People I've met from Melbourne were devastated when the voice referendum failed. I doubt they mind land acknowledgements.

unlike that disgusting abomination Irn-Bru.

Now that I know about this, I would be quite interested in finding a way to try it without having to actually visit that cursed island.

And Canadian accents aren't that funny.

It's an overly sweet bubblegum flavour drink that makes cherryade seem sophisticated and grown up.

You can buy bubblegum soda in the US, Irn Bru is just that.

You can buy it in Ireland too.

Having recently visited said cursed island (which was delightful and I highly recommend) I can safely say Irn Bru trying was the worst part of the trip. That includes a trip to the cliffs of Mohr that was so foggy we practically couldn't see our hands held out in front of our faces.

As a migrant who mainly works with migrants , the complaints about housing and traffic are identical to what you'd assume the white "racist" would say.

It's at the point where more secure migrants are annoyed at the last wave.

The other told me point blank there were way too many Indians arriving, that it is ruining the country and that they would vote for Trump if they lived in America. The former was a white Canadian of colonial stock and the latter was a first-gen Pakistani replete with accent.

Was this an attitude toward South Asian immigrants generally, or a reflection of Indian-Pakistani animosity? I'm assuming the former, but I've seen the latter around from time to time (my favorite example was a mixed group of second-generation students mocking that their parents probably hated each other).

I was told by this person that said animosity completely goes away upon migrating to the West, that Pakistanis hate Indians because they are “uneducated”.

Housing unaffordability remains near all time highs.

unemployment has begun to rise (now 6.6%) but for 15-24 year olds its nearly 20%

Canada's total fertility rate data for 2023 came out last week and shows a big drop to 1.26

I'd say the cause and effect is clear here. If young people can't get homes or jobs, then they won't be in a position to start a family.

The responsible middle class couple has a high floor of material attainment before starting a family. Price these people out of it and they'll not start families.

Here is the happiness list (younger age 30):

https://worldhappiness.report/assets/images/2024/ch02/Figure_2.2_1.webp

1 Lithuania (7.7)
2 Israel
3 Serbia
4 Iceland
5 Denmark (7.3)
And
62 United States (6.39)

Unhappiest youth are predominantly in African countries beside Lebanon on second last place and Afghanistan (1,82) on last place.

Why do people put any stock in happiness statistics? To me it looks like what it would be if we measured national temperature by feeling before the invention of the thermometer. Is Il Cairo very cold, cold, hot or very hot? In fact, it's even worse, because you have at least the possibility of moving somewhere else and experiencing another climate while you don't have the option of moving into somebody's else's head.

No idea. It's interesting how this kind of metric (self-reported on presumably a Likert scale of a subset of a population, probably only surveyed once) is typically ridiculed on the Motte, but here it seems to be just accepted.

I mean I’m probably claiming too much, but it looks to me like ethnic homogeneity is a better predictor than income for happiness.

Lebanon and Afghanistan are pretty homogenous as well.

  • -12

This is extremely inaccurate. Lebanon is famously split between feuding Sunni, Shia, and Maronite christian groups to the degree that their constitution sets ethnic quotas for power-sharing. Afghan is also split between many warring tribal-ethnic groups as well, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.

I admit I put my foot in it re: Afghanistan but I don't think Lebanon is a slam dunk. We're talking about ethnic differences here, so we have to look beyond "well Israel is 75% Jewish so it's homogenous". Those Jews come from all kinds of places with all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.

So, first off, I don’t believe I have ever heard a single person describe Israel as homogenous. Any country where a full one in four of its citizens is from an ethnolinguistically and religiously different group from the other three is, by definition, not homogenous.

And yes, you note that even within the Jewish Israeli population there are significant divisions. That’s also true, and also a source of political and cultural tension within Israeli society! My understanding is that the tensions between the Ashkenazi founding stock and the later waves of Sephardic and especially Mizrahi Jews produced massive friction in Israel for the first decades of its existence. Israel is also still to this day having major issues with the differences between its Ultra-Orthodox/Haredi population versus the other strains of Judaism.

So yes, you have correctly noticed that Israel is not in fact a homogeneous country.

So yes, you have correctly noticed that Israel is not in fact a homogeneous country.

Cool, sounds like we agree that at best the homogeneity /happiness relationship is not entirely straightforward.

Israel has been engaged in a decades-long violent campaign, with periodic mass-casualty events on both sides, against a hostile ethnic group within its own borders. This is your example of a happy country?

More comments

I mean that’s just not remotely accurate. Lebanon has several religious groups who have been in open conflict many times over its history. Maronite Christians, Orthodox Christians, both Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, Alawites, and that’s to say nothing of the masses of refugees from the Syrian conflict currently residing within its borders.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, has always been an incredibly ethnically diverse and fractious region. Pashtun, Balochs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazara, plus all kinds of obscure insular groups that still practice otherwise dead religious traditions, or who credibly claim direct descent from Alexander the Great’s wars against the Parthians a few thousand years ago.

Like, you’ve picked two of the least homogenous countries in the entire region.

I feel like this is going to be biased toward declaring groups that get along to be "homogeneous", and those that don't are subdivided into smaller groups until they do, with the broader discording factions declared "heterogeneous". You could divide the English into Anglos, Saxons, Normans, and so on, but they still mostly get along so you'll call them all "English".

The distinctions between Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Britons, Normans, etc. washed out hundreds of years ago, though. Nobody in England has spoken Norman French in over 500 years. Back when these groups were still linguistically and culturally distinct, they absolutely did not get along - see the wars between the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and then famously the conquest and subsequent violent subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans. It’s only in hindsight, after a centuries-long process of mixing and integration, that we consider these to be constituent ancestries of a unified population. (And of course the existence of Wales as a separate entity, and the revival of the Welsh language, are testaments to the fact that the pre-Anglo-Saxon Britonic people were in fact never fully integrated, despite centuries of effort.)

Meanwhile, in Lebanon and Afghanistan these groups are still very distinct, generally geographically segregated, and - again, most importantly - have been in open violent conflict at various times even within your and my lifetimes.

What is homogeneity if not ethnic cohesion? Everyone is their own group of one and human divisions are fractal. Boundaries exist because we decide they do.

Ethnic groups only exist insofar as they are willing to exclude. Which is why Anglos, Saxons and Normans no longer exist, but English do. Fusions and splits are common methods of ethnogenesis.

It's not a bias, it's the phenomenal definition of ethnic groups.

Part of homogeneity is common ethnic consciousness, commonality in language, religion, ancestry, insufficient history of remaining grudges and bad blood, etc. The later element, if it existed in the past, has declined today. The English are one ethnic group, even with some heterogeneous elements and diversity in their history.

Ethnic groups have some heterogeneity in them. As with most things, the amount matters. Increase substantially differences, and you get a nation comprising of different groups. This is a genuine difference that relates to accurately separating ethnic groups.

This doesn't bias things, since you still got a homogeneous situation if the divisions are sufficiently irrelevant and have a robustly common identity. Conversely you get heterogeneity when divisions are significant and ethnic groups don't get along. You are getting an accurate message that proves the advantages of a homogeneous country and of small enough differences among the people, so much so that they can be identified as a common ethnic group.

Israel is second place in world youth happiness?! Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?

Happiness in general doesn't seem to work the way modern people think it does. From my view, among the best predictors are is a) there are real, serious problems + b) we feel confident to handle them well.

Yes, if there is no challenge one can master it often is just a hedonistic treadmill.

There were a few posts last month on Reddit about American Beauty, the 25 year old Oscar movie with Kevin Spacey, and how weird not only the movie but the past time now feels. Together with Office Space and Fight Club artists struggled to find something to rebel against. Cold War was won, war against terror didn’t start yet, economy was great, racism solved, the environment ostensibly protected, peak oil unknown, feminism a joke, and gayness widely accepted by enlightened centrism. So the only way was to attack the mundane boringness of a secure middle class existence.

This is Lester Burnham‘s House in which he lived in 1999 with a wife and daughter and got deeply unhappy:

https://filmoblivion.com/2019/01/15/american-beauty-1999/

Sept 2024 the U.S. housing deficit has increased according to Zillow to 4.5 million.

Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?

Israel is winning a war (insofar as shooting fish in a barrel and tampering with Taiwanese pager shipments constitutes a war); what surprise is it that hot-blooded youngsters rejoice in seeing their enemies driven before them, and hearing the lamentations of their women?

"Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle. If you do not fight, life will never be won."

Million dollar question- so young Canadians want to leave, or no?

Like legal immigration to the US, Australia, etc is generally not easy, but is the mood among young Canadians a ‘we better get out of here’, yet?

Every young Canadian I've met thinks "America, Amirite?" Is the peak of humor and social commentary. They aren't going to move somewhere with guns and racism, which of course define the US.

I think Canadian men see American wages, which are often 2x for high skill professions and are very interested.

Then their wives remind them about abortion, no maternity leave, and school shootings and that’s the end of the conversation.

I think migration interest is highly gendered.

Then their wives remind them about abortion, no maternity leave, and school shootings and that’s the end of the conversation.

LOL. The jobs with 2x pay are in places with plenty of abortion and maternity leave (though we're somewhat cruel and will only allow one or the other at a given time).

There are plenty of very high salaries available in red states.

Yes, and id wager those salaries go farther too.

Part of the pitch i use when recruiting from blue states is; What's the point of making 100 - 200k a year if you're going to end up spending 90% of that to live in a filing cabinet and take the bus or subway to work? Come to [redacted], buy a 5 year old luxury car, and enjoy driving to work on clean well-maintained streets and living in an actual house.

Yeah, the salience of tail risk in decision making is quite a difference. And on Mat leave in particular, half the point of going to the US for a Canadian is to escape the two-income trap anyways.

Can someone steelman why a wife would care enough about abortion that said wife would tank a doubling of income and a better life? That just seems insane.

The other two are a misunderstanding and innumeracy

It's signaling, not reason.

Because expressing a willingness to move to America, especially a red state, from Canada impugns your progressive bona fides among your friends.

It really is that simple: “did you hear Claire is moving to Texas? I could never do that. Too many MAGAs down there, it’s crazy that she thinks she would fit in there. I went to Tampa once and everyone at the beach was white and you just know they all voted Trump. I was super uncomfortable”

But honestly who cares? If you are moving to the US, you will be forced to develop a new social group. So why care about the old?

They aren't going to move somewhere with guns and racism, which of course define the US.

Unless they can get a job paying twice as much, then it's like "TN-1, HERE I COME".

Canadas emigration numbers are about 40,000 a year which is very low. However, Canadian statistics have a huge gap in the measurement of emigration. They often make errors of 5 or 6 figures in a year and it’s only when the census is conducted that we know what has actually happened in the interim.

All we can really say is anecdotally, there is a huge outflow happening. I recently moved and the previous occupant of my house moved to the States. One of my friends became an ex-pat in Europe last summer and another just sold his place and is moving to Colombia. Yes anecdotal, but this hasn’t happened in my friend group before.

What we do have good stats on is people moving within country and the migration out of major cities is accelerating. It’s always been true that major cities are population sinks with low fertility and outmigration of natives to be replaced with immigrants. Recently , this has picked up and smaller Canadian cities like Halifax or Victoria have seen big inflows (ruining their housing markets too).

So people are responding with action which is great to see, but politically this is going to be the greatest ever repudiation of the left in Canada. The conservatives are polling at 47% among the young.

So people are responding with action which is great to see, but politically this is going to be the greatest ever repudiation of the left in Canada. The conservatives are polling at 47% among the young.

It will be interesting to see what the Conservatives actually do if (when) they form government. So far Poilievre has only offered the vaguest commitments to reducing inflow (saying things like he will "match immigration to rate of homebuilding").

The Conservative Party has historically been reliant on industries that take advantage of TFWs/international students. Almost half their MPs are landlords. They don't really want to slow this down anymore than the Liberals do. The swing of the youth vote towards them is in large part predicated on anti-immigration sentiment, so how do they reconcile this?

Luckily for them the Liberals have given them so much room to maneuver this is less of threading the needle and more finding your way out of an open door. Even cutting the inflow by half would leave them at roughly double the rate of the Harper years.

Almost half their MPs are landlords.

That seems oddly low- in the states I would assume that most people wealthy enough to be in congress own at least a renthouse or two.

Anybody who has qualms with these developments is a racist white supremacist and no true progressive. Those who object to the rise in immigration are dogwhistling xenophobes who are covertly advocating for racist policies and non-inclusion of marginalized ethnic minorities.

Liam Kofi Bright has written that "the culture war is sustained by a material inequality that no one is seriously trying to fix" - except for Trudeau, who has done more to fix this imbalance in the distribution of resources between whites and colored people people of colour than any other Prime Minister in the history of this country.

Any progressive who is actually serious about effecting social change (and not merely screaming about it on the internet or using the ideology as a cudgel to beat their enemies into submission) would "give away their property and superior opportunities" to marginalized groups to actually bring an end to systemic inequality. This includes, yes, giving hard-working immigrants from the third world, who did not grow up with the white privilege of an upbringing in a materially wealthy nation with superior access to education and career opportunities, a chance to improve their lives in Canada.

If anything, the growing disdain with the policies of the Trudeau administration is revealing that when push comes to shove, and white progressives are asked to make material sacrifices to uphold and stick to their principles, they immediately step down from their high pulpit of moral superiority and inclusivity. There is no free lunch, and this is what it takes to ensure that marginalized groups can also get a slice of the pie; you cannot have your cake and eat it too by simultaneously demanding material equity and then crying when those same materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour. This is the exact dynamic Liam Kofi Bright outlines in the previously linked paper, "White Psychodrama." White progressives should either put up, grin and bear the cost of the very same social justice they demanded through bloody cancellation and mob invective, or end the charade and shut the fuck up.

disproportionately low skill

compete with young Canadians

This sounds more like an indictment of young Canadians, their lack of skills, and their inability to compete in the marketplace with those who will do their exact same entry-level service job, except for lower pay, and for longer hours. Immigrants are hard-working, ambitious, and (possibly even literally) hungry for success. Their lack of access to said opportunities instills within them a greater work ethic and drive to succeed when they don't have the Bank of White Mummy and Daddy to catch them when they fall after their six-year all expenses paid academic career in Theatrical Non-Binary Basket Weaving fails to take off. Why should white Canadians feel that their white privilege of being born in a deeply racist country entitles them to continue upholding the institutions of racism by denying ethnic minorities a job that they can do just as well as a white? What entitles these already privileged whites to a job over minorities?

Prime Minister Trudeau gave an interview where he said: “Housing needs to retain its value. It’s a huge part of people’s potential retirement and future and nest egg.

As an ethnic minority homeowner, I agree, and I refuse to let whites claw back the very same resources they loudly and proudly proclaimed they wanted to redistribute to marginalized folk like myself.

  • -17

If anything, the growing disdain with the policies of the Trudeau administration is revealing that when push comes to shove, and white progressives are asked to make material sacrifices to uphold and stick to their principles, they immediately step down from their high pulpit of moral superiority and inclusivity. There is no free lunch, and this is what it takes to ensure that marginalized groups can also get a slice of the pie; you cannot have your cake and eat it too by simultaneously demanding material equity and then crying when those same materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour. This is the exact dynamic Liam Kofi Bright outlines in the previously linked paper, "White Psychodrama." White progressives should either put up, grin and bear the cost of the very same social justice they demanded through bloody cancellation and mob invective, or end the charade and shut the fuck up.

What I suspect in this case is something like what’s happening in the USA. The elites want the immigrants to drive up costs of goods (increased population leading to increased demand) and to hold down wages. This is how immigrants tend to improve the economy of the country they go to. On the one hand, as new arrivals, they’d need housing, and all the stuff that comes with it. They will need furniture, vehicles, clothes, shoes, kids need school supplies etc. probably toys. So the price of these things go up because suddenly you have doubled the size of the town and thus driven up demand. At the same time, their expectations for wages are dirt cheap— and this delights the business owners who can now bid down the cost of labor (and BONUS! Get points for your work to increase diversity) and even skimp on safety and health rules as third world countries have poor conditions and the workers aren’t going to complain about treatment that while bad by first world standards is wonderful for people used to poor conditions at the workplace. OSHA (and the Canadian equivalent) don’t exist in most developing countries.

So the benefits are the support depends very much on which side of the class divide you sit on. If you’re part of the investment class, immigration is net positive. The stocks will go up, GDP goes up, labor becomes cheaper and more compliant. If your on the working class side, your wages stagnate, your costs go up, your kids are denied opportunities for work (to make room for the cheaper and more compliant immigrant population who won’t complain or ask for raises) their schools spend more effort to teach immigrants English than getting your kids prepared for life after high school.

And there is the reason for the lack of support. It’s a battle between the beneficiary class who wants all these immigrants and the benefits they offer to their social class, vs the working class that all of this is happening too. They don’t like that their wages aren’t going up, or that the new immigrants are allowing dirty and dangerous conditions on the job. They don’t like the resources that should be going to the school computer lab instead being shunted to hiring scores of ESL teachers and textbooks written in whatever language the kids speak.

This sounds more like an indictment of young Canadians, their lack of skills, and their inability to compete in the marketplace with those who will do their exact same entry-level service job, except for lower pay, and for longer hours. Immigrants are hard-working, ambitious, and (possibly even literally) hungry for success. Their lack of access to said opportunities instills within them a greater work ethic and drive to succeed when they don't have the Bank of White Mummy and Daddy to catch them when they fall after their six-year all expenses paid academic career in Theatrical Non-Binary Basket Weaving fails to take off. Why should white Canadians feel that their white privilege of being born in a deeply racist country entitles them to continue upholding the institutions of racism by denying ethnic minorities a job that they can do just as well as a white? What entitles these already privileged whites to a job over minorities?

I think you have a wildly skewed idea of the kinds of people who live in small towns. These people don’t have the resources you think they do. They’re mostly working class. The immigrants are not taking the jobs of high skilled graduates, they’re taking jobs from the working class. And working class people don’t actually have the bank of dad to fall back on. So when they don’t get early work experience it’s an economic setback. Further, these people might be trying to support a family. The advantage immigrants have is that they’re cheap and compliant. They might work a bit harder, but the main thing is that they won’t ewww try to get better wages or conditions. They’ll work for peanuts and sleep 3-4 families to a house so they can live on $10 an hour. No first world labor can afford to work for that little, but now that we have immigrants, you can forget about your wages going up. But remember, if you’re not in favor of being underbid by imported labor, you’re a white privileged racist.

Your comment is triggering Poe's law for me. The sarcasm is too sincere for me to be 100% sure. I'm hoping my reply makes sense irrespective of your intent.

Rapid change of any sort doesn't work. It's practically a law of nature. Wealth (20th century Saudi), Land (South Africa), Agency (Liberia) or Demographics.

A progressive may support the logical endpoint of their philosophy. But even in ideal circumstances, truly redistributive outcomes cannot be achieved overnight. It's well known social science, but progressive countries ignore it. They utilize 'rapid immigration as national policy', but never stage their immigration to allow for win-win outcomes.

Singapore does it right (Lee Kwan Yew is always right. Motherfucker). America brute forces it, hogs the literal best of the world and wins. But, Western Europe & Canada seem to be confused about what they want in their immigrants.

If you want model citizens, then don't import low skill men, aged 20-30. They're are bad immigrants everywhere. This cohort commits the vast majority of crime. If you want them to integrate, import young college students (to schools with majority Canadians) or 30+ low skill men with families and toddlers who can be 'civilized' from day 1. Your nation needs nurses and women are good immigrants.....so start nursing programs. If small towns need labor, then sprinkle families which have incentive to drop roots and integrate....rather than bringing all young men to 1 town, who room-up and ghettoize.

Sweden, Germany, Southern France, Canada....It's all the same. The immigrant group differs in each place. But the haphazard and almost suicidal choice of how immigrants are sub-sampled guarantees bad outcomes. Honestly, 'refugee' and 'asylee' are such shit categories. Too easy to game when you come from a desperate situation from your home country.

Sounds like you are one or two generations removed from a country in the global south. Here is a hypothetical for you.

Imagine there was a 20% white Mormon minority in your country. They immigrate in large numbers and have more kids per woman than the native born. The flow is so large they don’t need to assimilate in any significant way and within 3 generations they become majority of your society.

Imagine their cultural norms start to change how people interact in your culture and it begins to change politics in a way you dislike. For instance, suppose they insist that “materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour” and they use politics to do it. People like you are discriminated against in hiring to give these newcomers a leg up since they are disproportionately poor. You and your kids hear endlessly, everywhere that your society is evil and you owe a blank check to these people.

Just try to inhabit the thought experiment for a second. What emotion do you feel? If you are a normal person, its probably a deep sense of loss – the “black pill” so to speak. The other obvious response is to ask “why do I owe these people anything? I am not gaining anything from their presence. Hell, they owe me for what I am sacrificing!” And indeed you are sacrificing: In sufficient numbers immigration entails the destruction of a society and its replacement with something else. The buildings might remain the same, but everything else would have changed. I’d say those Mormons owed you an enormous debt. And if you decided you wanted to avoid that outcome altogether – that your homeland was the only homeland you had and was worth preserving – then you would be a totally normal person, and your preference should be respected.

On non-inclusion of minorities and racism

Institutions and individuals should treat people equally in the equal-before-the-law Jeffersonian sense. This is what the majority owes the minority. One of the worst things about Canada's mass immigration plus wokeness is that we are jettisoning that sense of equality for equality measured by equal outcomes by group.

The minority owes the majority assimilation. Multiculturalism was a mistake. I take the deep roots thesis seriously: assimilation is a multi-generational process and often a two-way process where the native born can assimilate backwards to newcomer norms. Societies are basically a weighted average of the cultures that make it up, tending towards the lowest common denominator for things like trust – i.e. a high-trust culture can be destroyed once a certain threshold of low-trust people enter it. Your post is frankly full of ethnic resentment against whites, why would I want more of this in my society?

Even though I do believe in the equal treatment principle, that principle is compatible with caring about the future of your society and its culture. I don’t think Canadian culture is improved by admixture of 10% more Indian norms and aesthetics — or those of anyone else for that matter. Minorities should remain small so the assimilation pull towards the mainstream is very strong and the cultural substrate that is Anglo-French Canada can persist into the future. This is what the majority owes itself if it has any self respect.

On Canada living up to its ideals

Your specific point on Canada seems to be that Trudeau is actually delivering the goods that progressives seem to promise and Canada’s coming rejection of Trudeau-ism is hypocrisy. I think that is basically fair and is an indictment of progressivism. I’d only add three things: First when progressives want to redistribute resources on the basis of ethnicity, they are committing a grave injustice. Second, Trudeau’s Liberals have not actually done any of that redistribution. The beneficiaries of his policies are principally old white boomers who own houses. The losers are young people -- disproportionately non-white -- who live in major cities and have inherited more debt, more costly housing, and a worse job market. And third, even if you think that everyone is entitled to the opportunity to live in Canada as you do (and I definitely don’t), the intergenerational transfer from young to old represented by forcing young Canadians to compete with the global poor for work and housing is socially destabilizing and should be opposed for that reason alone.

As an ethnic minority homeowner, I agree, and I refuse to let whites claw back the very same resources they loudly and proudly proclaimed they wanted to redistribute to marginalized folk like myself.

They should never have loudly and proudly proclaimed it. And a fixation on housing as a store of wealth is a feature of immigrant cultures (especially Chinese and Indian) that has caused enormous harm to Canada and I would love to see it sent back.

While I don’t disagree with the main thrust of your post, you appear to have taken the bait of a troll. See this comment by the same user, whose profile is presumably private to keep people from keeping track of the various troll posts, for a general flavor of said user’s meager output.

Oof.

I mean I suspected he was a troll at first, but it was so elaborate complete with the nonsensical woke sociology links.

You are triggering my sarcasm meter, but hey - goody for you. I can't wait for unrestricted immigration so everyone gets to find out what it's like to be a Chinese gaokao examinee.

Meritocracy means you lose when you aren't good enough. For the bottom 99.99999% of us, trivially identifiable by the ocean of data harvested every single day, this means we might as well not exist. Let's peacefully hold hands and walk into the most cost-effective euthanasia chambers possible, so the better ones can move into the future!


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