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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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A recent article in NR provides a good example of the nature of today's pro-life movement (emphasis added):

The Future of the Pro-Life Movement Is Going to Be Built in Our Own Homes

When I reflect back on the past year, one story keeps coming to mind. It’s not a cultural trend or a court case, but rather a very personal, hidden story that for all I know speaks to so many other hidden stories like it.

One of the most radiant, joyful people I know chose life against the odds when she was just 15 years old; she told her story on social media only this year. This woman, Veronica Keene, is one of untold numbers of women who chose life against the advice of most who knew her well enough to offer it.

{snip}

When I look at her life — and at her children, her grandchildren, and her happy 34-year marriage — I wonder how many women would have chosen life if they’d felt strong enough to reject all of the voices telling them not to.

{snip}

So challenge your young men. Encourage them to become responsible, loving men who will respect, honor, and take care of the women in their lives. Model strength and grace for them. Show up for them every day. Give them the love and guidance they need to help build healthy, supportive relationships as adults.

Set your daughters’ standards high, too. Make sure they know they can come to you for advice and support when or if they make destructive decisions. Make sure they know they are worthy of respect, deserving of love.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-future-of-the-pro-life-movement-is-going-to-be-built-in-our-own-homes/

I suspect that some people support or at least do not oppose pro-life because they see it as a "cultural" defeat for feminism. But ask yourself, is this really any better? There's the same gender-based double standards, but only one side is telling them the path to having a 34-year marriage is getting pregnant at 15 years old. (Yes, I know girls used to marry and have children at 16 back in the 19th century, the keyword there is married, very different from the trailer-park behavior this article is promoting.)

[ETA: you can read the article by using archive.ph]

I know girls used to marry and have children at 16 back in the 19th century,

Beyond the Hajnal Line, that is. Definitely not in either the US or Britain. (It's true that the average age at first marriage dropped significantly for both men and women immediately after WW2 in the US, but that trend only lasted a few years and never repeated.)

This wasn't unheard of for American women (for instance, Rachel Plummer married at 14).

I suspect that it was more common on the frontier, though.

It wasn't unheard of indeed, but wasn't the norm either. Probably not even in the frontier.

Indeed. In the 1550s in England, the average age at first marriage was 26 for women and 29 for men.

Why would this say anything more about the actual nature of the pro-life movement than what NPR wants it to be?

Presumably because this is from NR, the National Review, a mainstream conservative publication — not National Public Radio.

NPR (National Public Radio) != NR (National Review)

a "cultural" defeat for feminism

...

So challenge your young men. Encourage them to become responsible, loving men who will respect, honor, and take care of the women in their lives.

Set your daughters’ standards high, too. Make sure they know they can come to you for advice and support when or if they make destructive decisions.

This is what your run-of-the-mill anti-feminists don't get. Women nagging men into protecting them from the consequences of their decisions isn't particular to these or those ideological tenets. The law she lives by is that law and nothing else.

Yeah, as I recently mentioned, there's a lot of ideological agreement across much of the board when it comes to blaming men for the consequences of women's coffee decisions.

I think, technically, the pro-life position is "do not abort your child" - but it's true that Pro Life Tribe is bigger than that, and does have broader positions.

I don't understand the complaint you have here, though - based on the article, there's no recommendation of trailer-park behavior like getting pregnant at 15. There's an isolated instance where, from what I can tell, someone chose not to abort their child and has now been married for 34 years and has grandchildren. (It's unclear to me if she married the father of her child). This outcome seems good to me and I don't take the story to be recommending the route used to get there. Similarly, given that some number of people will, I am told, get pregnant at 15, keeping the child and getting married seems to me to be a preferable outcome to aborting the child and remaining unwed.

Maybe you can elaborate on what you find objectionable? Or did I miss something? As far as I can tell, National Review is not promoting out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies as being a starting route to successful marriages, and if Veronica Keene married as a teenager the article doesn't mention it.

there's no recommendation of trailer-park behavior like getting pregnant at 15

There's no condemnation of it either.

Similarly, given that some number of people will, I am told, get pregnant at 15

What I find objectionable is the mentality that teenage pregnancies just randomly fall on some proportion of the population. In fact, they are far more likely to occur in some subcultures than others, specifically those that treat it as something that just randomly happens.

What I find objectionable is the mentality that teenage pregnancies just randomly fall on some proportion of the population. In fact, they are far more likely to occur in some subcultures than others, specifically those that treat it as something that just randomly happens.

From what I've seen, conservative and particularly religiously conservative communities – and there's a strong overlap here with pro-lifers (and, you might be relieved to hear, National Review!) are much more likely to articulate getting pregnant out of wedlock as a moral choice rather than a sort of chance occurrence [although I am unpersuaded that anyone really believes that] – so I think perhaps you're misattributing that mentality to pro-lifers.

But I also think pro-lifers have noticed that one driver of abortion is shame, and (since their view is that an unborn child shouldn't be aborted) they think "see, pregnancy is not the end of your life, you can be a happy and successful person even if you get pregnant unexpectedly" is a better message than "you moron, you complete idiot, you skank, you got yourself knocked up."

I think it can be hard to articulate a holistic message of "women shouldn't get pregnant out of marriage, that is a moral failing on their part if it is volitional, but if they do they should bring the child to term and trust that good things can still come out of that life" because there is some degree of tension or mixed messaging there, but I do think this is what a majority of strong pro-lifers in the United States believe and a position National Review is much more likely to air than, say, the New York Times.

only one side is telling them the path to having a 34-year marriage is getting pregnant at 15 years old

That isn't what the words you've quoted have said. They say that is a path, not the path. Any sane pro lifer in this day and age would probably Counsel waiting until graduating high school before marrying the sweet heart and, maybe naively, they'd Counsel not having sex until then. But if you do have sex before then, and that sex does result in a pregnancy, they'd say you should not abort the pregnancy and instead raise the kid, leaning on your family and the family of the father for support in doing this which they also think should be provided.

"Any sane pro lifer in this day and age would probably Counsel waiting until graduating high school before marrying the sweet heart and, maybe naively, they'd Counsel not having sex until then."

Then why doesn't the article say that?

Then why doesn't the article say that?

Presumably the same reason it didn't wade into tax policy or include a pot roast recipe. It isn't an article attempting to lay out structured life advise for young people. It uses a story about some girl who made the best of a bad situation and they want to celebrate that choice without litigating a counterfactual world where she behaved better up until the point of the needing to make that choice. And then it goes on about needing to reach and inspire young people to also not get abortions. It say nothing at all about whether it was good to pregnant at 15, they're probably christian and the sex was almost certainly out of wedlock so one can presume they disapprove of it. The point is that if you find yourself in that situation they want you to keep the baby.

This is an article by pro life people speaking to pro life people, they probably expect the good faith of the reader to not assume they are encouraging something that not many encourage. Or maybe they have some other article supporting 15 year old marriages that I'm not aware of?

Presumably the same reason it didn't wade into tax policy or include a pot roast recipe. It isn't an article attempting to lay out structured life advise for young people.

The title of the article is "The Future of the Pro-Life Movement Is Going to Be Built in Our Own Homes." Subtitle is "We have a tremendous opportunity to actively build the future of our culture, starting with our kids."

It's a meta level up, it's giving advice to kids, it's giving advice to parents and some larger vague community. The difference between and article meant to be read by teachers and students.

What’s naive about it? There are lots of people who don’t have sex before marriage, which is what the pro-life position would actually advocate.

Abstinence before marriage is a fine choice, but given that it is far from universal, an ideology that aspires to mass-influence should probably make some accommodation or at least nod at reality.

It is not naive to advocate for what you want, it's naive to do so without any awareness that it's a very minority position.

Part of the pro-life program is making that position mainstream. Abstinence has been a core part of pro-life since pro-life became a thing.

Sure. And complete cessation of all animal products & testing is a core part of PETA. But in the meantime they still agitate for lesser goals that they hope are stepping stones to that reality.

I was astonished when my fiancee's family got indignant and saw it as a red flag that we were waiting until marriage to have sex.

I'm astonished you were astonished, and I'm curious just what rock you've been living under to be unaware that the average person would see that as a very odd life choice these days, and probably indicative of other trad religious leanings they might disapprove of.

Yes, I was a lot younger and not yet so aware of how out of hand the situation had gotten in general.

EDIT:

probably indicative of other trad religious leanings they might disapprove of

Also, yes.

If that happened to me I'd be worried that my in-laws-to-be were indignant because they know someone else has already smashed it first, and didn't want shit to suddenly hit the fan one day when I found out.

Lmao, good point. If that's what was gonna happen much better it comes out for everyone before marriage.

How did that even come up? Seems like an odd topic to discuss over dinner.

I suspect the topic didn't arise over dinner but during a private conversation between the fiancee and her mother.

For some reason this reminds me of the joke that when your in-laws are asking you when you and their daughter will start trying for a baby, they're effectively asking you when you're going to start creampieing their daughter.

Isn't it normally implicitly taken for granted that your daughter is getting creampied after getting married?

That’s seriously a joke? What a bizarre, pornographic thing to think, let alone say.

Actually, in light of the discussion below, I have a different question to ask you: if you had a daughter, would you ever want her to have sex with anyone? It seems to me that a parent with a healthy relationship with his or her daughter would absolutely want her to have sex with her husband and then to bear children as the fruit of that union. Your recent comments, on the other hand, seem to imply that you believe anything other than perpetual virginity is a shameful thing in a daughter.

Meh. I wouldn’t fret over this issue. We’re only human, and people’s priorities can change in a short time when circumstances change. If you’re the daughter of an intact middle-class suburban family, you’ll probably be expected by your parents to avoid pregnancy at any cost while you’re a student. But then a couple of years pass and one day you’ll suddenly be expected by them and your other relatives in general to find a husband as soon as possible and get nutted into with the specific intent of getting pregnant. It does seem odd. It’s like one of the Asian-American(?) female commenters here who provided and anecdote about her mother. She kept pestering her with the question “When are you becoming a doctor?” after sending her off to university. Later it instantly turned into “When am I becoming a grandma?” – WTF? That’s the complete opposite of what she kept asking for! I imagine this is what @Sloot was referring to in general.

That’s seriously a joke? What a bizarre, pornographic thing to think, let alone say.

That's the nature of non-Dad-adjacent jokes, that there'll be some people out there who'll get their knickers a bit twisted upon hearing them.

It seems to me that a parent with a healthy relationship with his or her daughter would absolutely want her to have sex with her husband and then to bear children as the fruit of that union.

Yes, that'd be preferred if my real or hypothetical daughter had sex with her husband within the confines of marriage to produce children. I'm thankful that many of my female relatives did as such to bless us all with more young family members. I'm not a Stork-truther so I presume those pregnancies, when they occurred, were the outcome of marital sex.

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What a bizarre, pornographic thing to think, let alone say.

Does "trying for a child" have a meaning other than attempting to get pregnant, usually achieved by a man ejeculating into a woman (in slang called a "creampie")? Unless it does, I do not anything worthy of this extreme level of pearl-clutching over a funny rephrase with the exactly same meaning, but with less obfuscation.

It actually goes beyond that. If we’re talking about a man and a woman who aged out of their peak fertility already, which in the current state of society is normally the case at first marriage, basically their entire lifestyles need to be oriented around the specific goal of successful conception if they want to have a child ASAP. That is, they need to pay attention to their diets, the ovulation cycle, biological clock, hormone levels etc. Whatever psychological blocks they may have standing in the way of that - which may be entirely possible, as they're basically expected to copulate with the specific intent of breeding for the first time in their lives - also need to be removed through therapy.

Most people have a concept of propriety, and most people understand that words have contextual or connotative meanings beyond the literal, physical act which they denote. "Make love", "have sex", and "fuck" all refer to the same action in a broad sense, but they obviously have very different meanings when you come across them in the wild.

Likewise, "I would like to have a child with your daughter", "I would like to breed your daughter", and "I would like to creampie your daughter" may all indicate that the person would like to have vaginal sex with the daughter in a way that's open to the possibility of conception and pregnancy, but obviously the connotations are very different.

Lewis2 is correct here - 'creampie' specifically is pornographic slang. It's contextually inappropriate because it communicates disrespect. Botond173 made an edgy and offensive joke.

Maybe you like edgy jokes, and if so that's fine for you, but pretending that it's not clear why someone might object is silly.

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Someone made an offhand comment about how 'old-fashioned' it was (in general, and pejoratively) and I disagreed and it went from there.

Right, I have in the past argued that it is actually not too much to ask for young people to not have sex in high school. I just didn't want to make this a post about that argument so I gave theoretical ground.

Well, who'd be doing the asking? In the current cultural milieu, parents are unable or unwilling to thot-patrol their daughters. If parents can't or won't, what chance does anyone else have without a coup-complete solution?

Some parents are even outright enablers. For example, I saw this comment on DSL a few weeks ago and I was like alan_grant_removing_sunglasses.gif. Buying your teenaged daughter a larger bed so some boy can more comfortably rail her is taking the daughter cuckoldry to new heights. What's next, buying a chair for a corner of her room so you can better cheer on your little girl?

Thot-patrol is not how parents would typically put it, but that DSL comment is very much the exception- the electronic leash gets ever tighter, teen sex keeps declining, and with typical parental attitudes towards teen sex(especially parents of daughters) it doesn’t take a genius to connect the two.

That DSL commenter is European.

I think calling it thott patroling is probably not going to be very helpful. We're working on a kid now, if it's a daughter I may be naive but I think I can help her understand what constitutes good behavior in her own long term interest. I was receptive to this kind of reasoning as a kid.

Buying your teenaged daughter a larger bed so some boy can more comfortably rail her is taking the daughter cuckoldry to new heights.

What if she was married to him?

We live in a society where teen marriage is very rare, and matrilocality is simply not part of our history(even if you go far back enough to have extended families as the norm, they were patrilocal).

Moderately in the direction of what @BurdensomeCount said.

It'd still feel weird to me, but orders-of-magnitude better than the situation in the linked comment. It'd feel less so but also weird to buy a larger bed for a married son, but for somewhat different reasons. Channeling my inner Tony Soprano and Lucille Bluth: "What's wrong with you, Junior? You can't afford a larger mattress and bedframe to better bang your wife? How much could a set cost, like $10?"

Presumably a hypothetical married daughter and son-in-law would have their own house and income, so I wouldn't be enabling, hosting, and subsidizing their trysts. And, if they split, at least my daughter would be compensated via a mostly-consensual divorce settlement (and thus indirectly, me, for not having to do a complete bail-out of my daughter). Plus, all else equal, a married daughter would be older than an unmarried one, and the biological clock is ticking...

According to the linked comment, she received the bed as a gift for her 16th birthday, to make her boyfriend feel more comfortable.

That's very different. At that point the husband is a part of the family just as much as the daughter (or at least in a functioning social system would be seen that way). In fact now the husband is financially responsible for your daughter instead of you (in a functioning system again), so who's really getting cuckolded here we may ask if we want to go down that line of enquiry...

I have to ask this straight at this point, would you breed with your own daughter if inbreeding and social backlash was not in the cards?

  • -21

This is not a question. This is an insult masquerading as a question.

You've been warned about this before. Stop doing it or you will be banned.

How would you clarify whether there's anything behind a person's repeated, ambiguously ironic evocation of the "daughter is the ultimate cuck" meme without it sounding like an insult? Cuckoldry is a term referring to your wife being fucked by another man. Therefore, if you're being cucked when someone fucks your daughter, she must be your wife.

We have (had) self-proclaimed pedofascists here, so I can't really assume asking whether my interlocutor is one must be taken as an insult.

I do not believe for one second that you asked him if he'd "breed with his daughter" as anything other than an insult. You find his views offensive and you reached for what you hoped would be an effective way to express your disgust. I am not deceived about your intentions and I am telling you to stop. Express your offense in another manner.

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That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste. "Hur dur, you just want to fuck your own daughter." Note women don't receive such attempts at well-poisoning when they prefer a real or hypothetical son to be tall/athletic/etc.

The purity ring dances were the most incestuous father-daughter events possible outside of literal orgies. This well was poisoned by purity ring enthusiasts circa 15 years ago.

That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste.

I disagree. While it is sometimes used to well-poison in this way (and while I do think that our society severely undervalues chastity and parents do have a moral responsibility to protect the chastity of their children and particularly their daughters), I think that "your behavior strongly suggests a subconscious-at-best desire to fuck your own daughter" is an insult that is deserved far more often than it is issued.

Perhaps it is precisely because of the complex collapse of traditional sexual morality in our society that so many fathers are unable to articulate a desire to protect their daughters' virtue that does not ironically sound disgustingly incestuous. (I would certainly expect that this is a large part of the problem; the pathology I'm pointing at rings so false to me because it seems detached from any hope of eventually finding one's daughter a suitable husband. It's like a male-pattern counterpart to empty nest syndrome, at least as afraid of one's daughter growing up and getting married and moving out as it is of her falling victim to some cad. Watch out for rhetoric suggesting that the reason the daughter's chastity should be preserved is to extend her easy low-maintenance childhood; this implies both that the father specifically objects to the thought of his daughter getting married young and that he'll be fine with her becoming a slut once she gets too old to maintain the facade of childhood anymore.) In any case, though, I don't think that this behavior helps to preserve traditional sexual morality on either a personal or societal level.

("Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc, aposematically convey to me: "I am unable to distinguish between the concepts of protecting my daughter from men with ill intent and kidnapping her to go live together in a cabin in the woods, and I am very close to doing the latter; I have often considered the logistics of setting up a Josef Fritzl basement.")

Trads probably don't get to blame 100% of this problem on modernity, though. A lot of it does seem rooted in (echoes of the long-gone) patriarchal model, in which women are property first of their father and then of their husband, and, IE, rape is understood as a form of property crime. While such a model does have a lot to recommend it, it also clearly has a lot to disrecommend it, and though I have a very low opinion of feminism, I think one of the more compelling (and fringe) complaints they've made is that traditional societies seem to have had a lot of unreported incestuous rape going on. The parallel construction of father-daughter and husband-wife is clearly very easy to fuck up and confuse both in ancient and modern contexts, and I would generally urge people to maintain a clearer delineation between these roles.

Libertines would like us to think that the offputting thing about purity balls, purity rings, and the like is the purity, the thing that libertines want to destroy. The actual offputting thing is the balls, the rings, signifiers of marriage where no marriage can actually exist, with the father in the husband role. These young women should be getting married off ASAP, not LARPing as pseudowives for their fathers. I would also suggest that, when fathers participate in their daughters' weddings, they should take care not to equate themselves too directly with their new son-in-laws, and to generally be watchful of innuendo and scandal. General talk of "giving away my daughter" is iffy; talk of "giving this man my daughter to love as I once loved her, though we'll always know that I was first" is right out.

Of course, there are also men who deserve this insult for reasons that have nothing to do with some malformed defense of chastity. (Sometimes, indeed, because they are insufficiently protective of their daughters' chastity; because they proudly parade their daughters around in a sexualized fashion, unbothered.) Certainly, for everything positive one can say about Donald Trump, and there is a lot, this is an attack he has invited upon himself.

Obviously, I find things like purity balls, purity rings, “rules for dating my daughter” t-shirts, “pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals” to be colossally cringe. However, from those would be a massive leap to Fritzi-maxxing.

And I too find Trump’s comments and actions toward his daughter to be weird and cringe. I’m slightly, somewhat surprised that anti-Trumpers have not attempted to make more hay out of this over the past few years, but they also likely feel a bit handcuffed since Hunter and Beau Biden are eskimo brothers, and thus don’t want to work the incest angle too hard.

I would also suggest that, when fathers participate in their daughters' weddings, they should take care not to equate themselves too directly with their new son-in-laws, and to generally be watchful of innuendo and scandal. General talk of "giving away my daughter" is iffy; talk of "giving this man my daughter to love as I once loved her, though we'll always know that I was first" is right out.

I have attended many weddings in my adult life, but thankfully I’ve been spared from witnessing such cringe. If/when a daughter gets married, at her wedding I’ll likely be thinking “thank goodness this is finally someone else’s problem.”

That being said, this general phenomenon (not wanting your teenaged or young adult daughter to get fucked outside of marriage) is hardly limited culturally, temporally, geographically. For example, in some parts of Latin America, teenaged boys or young men will sometimes call the fathers of their attractive female acquaintances “suegro” in person; this is perceived as impolite and disrespectful, and said fathers will often seethe.

“Suegro” just means “father-in-law,” although sometimes it can be used to refer to father of unmarried boyfriend or girlfriend. Thus, it’s not inherently gross or sexual in and of itself.

However, why does such a father seethe and react as if the teenaged boy or young man referred to his wife as “novia” (girlfriend) or “esposa” (wife)? Shouldn’t it be a compliment that a teenaged boy or young man finds your daughter desirable?

Does the father just secretly want to fuck his daughter? Or is he reacting as most men across time and cultures would do, in having an instinctive disgust response to his daughter potentially getting fucked outside of a committed, lifetime relationship (which these teenaged boys and young men presumably do not intend on providing)?

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"Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc,

All those plus purity balls and the like are nothing but desperate, dim-witted but humanly understandable reactions to the harsh reality of the 'complex collapse of traditional sexual morality'. They also seem to be based on the rather flimsy assumption that a great bunch of sexually attractive, thuggish chads are tripping over one another to win the daughter's hand. The sad social reality is that she'll probably get proposed by one, maybe two ordinary dudes, provided that dad isn't around with his silly antics.

("Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc, aposematically convey to me: "I am unable to distinguish between the concepts of protecting my daughter from men with ill intent and kidnapping her to go live together in a cabin in the woods, and I am very close to doing the latter; I have often considered the logistics of setting up a Josef Fritzl basement.")

I am not seeing how "hurt my daughter and I kill you" equates to "I am unable to distinguish between 'hurt my daughter and I kill you' and being a rapist kidnapper".

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the reason the daughter's chastity should be preserved is to extend her easy low-maintenance childhood

This naturally follows from the notion that women are property, though; it is your God-given unimpeachable right to prolong that adolescence as long as possible, and as such you may do as you wish. (The same applies to the incest thing, for what should be obvious reasons- of course, feminists have abused the privilege to rewrite 'marital rape' to mean 'wife who is only doing it to keep up the marriage', but from 1910 through now we thought the answer to 'unrestrained male selfishness' was 'unrestrained female selfishness' [and traditionalists by their nature had no good counterargument] so that's just what we get, I guess.)

"They're not even human beings until 25" (and the earlier age of consent laws, which traditionalists absolutely fawn over) were wonderful gifts to the traditionalists of that bent, especially because "preserve my child as being a child" is a natural small-c conservative impulse. In fact, that's a very womanly impulse, which should be highly insulting to those would-be property owners (who will state "our sex is endowed with a healthier sense of risk management" as a reason why women should be property) but I digress.

Remember, the most sexually libertine period in US history was also the closest to the traditionalist ideal; marriages still happened fast and young (despite only 1/5th of high schoolers retaining their virginities- guess that whole 'but muh virgin marriage' thing wasn't that important after all, and maybe simply having (on average) a more beautiful wife at marriage does a lot to sand that edge down). The fact that traditionalists failed to capitalize on the economic circumstances that led society to turn away from the sexual revolution (since this could have been a viable path as opposed to what the progressives laid down in the '80s) is, uh, all on the traditionalists.

Libertines would like us to think that the offputting thing about purity balls, purity rings, and the like is the purity, the thing that libertines want to destroy.

It's more about the stagnation and waste that an obsession with purity creates (just like the stagnation and waste that an obsession with ownership creates). Which your neo-traditionalism will naturally have to overcome- that is why you want marriages where none are set up to exist, because that is a way to overcome that (that doesn't enable the wicked wasting away of your daughters like the aformentioned progressive-endorsed LARPing does)- in other words, it is progress. Property rights come with property responsibilities.

Replacing it with nothing was, is, and will continue to be unworkable.

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I'm tempted to nominate this for an AAQC.

See, @sun_the_second, this is how you imply you're wondering if someone wants to fuck their daughter without being directly insulting.

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It's a typical response to literally referring to a man's protectiveness of his daughter's chastity (a woman he is expected to not be fucking) with the same terminology as a man's protectiveness of his wife's faithfullness (a woman he is expected to be fucking). It's quite rich to glug the poison straight from the skull and bones vial in front of everyone and then claim you were poisoned.

I'm not attacking possessiveness or general "thot-patrolling" here, my question is about the specific choice of language. Do you want to make your daughter your wife, and if not, why do you imply someone fucking your daughter would make you the same thing as someone fucking your wife? You hide behind "but other people at other venues ask such questions for other reasons, and anyway those other people don't sufficiently interrogate women like that".

Note that women will absolutely receive accusations of wanting their son for themselves if they chase away all his girlfriends and marriage prospects, if I can help it.

why do you imply someone fucking your daughter would make you the same thing as someone fucking your wife?

Because, as should be obvious, I'm not equating the two; I just find it an amusing metaphor and hyperbole.

  1. A lot of men feel a certain sense of a disgust at the thought of random boys/men fucking his wife
  2. A lot of men feel a certain sense of a disgust at the thought of random boys/men fucking his daughter

If the first one occurs, one would say he got cucked. It's not hard to see why "cucked" could then be extended as a metaphor for the second. Cuckold itself is a metaphor derived from the cuckoo bird.

Do you get similarly indignant and performatively bewildered when someone uses a term like "Republicuck" or "wagecuck", or says that he or she got "cucked" by a blue-shell in Mario Kart right before the finish line? A week and a half back I microhumorously referred to myself as "wagecucking" or "salarycucking" in describing myself working a fulltime job; if you saw it at the time, would you have thrown a challenge flag to grandstand and "interrogate" me as to why I'd compare my employment status to my wife getting plowed by another man? If you did see it at the time, why didn't you?

You hide behind "but other people at other venues ask such questions for other reasons, and anyway those other people don't sufficiently interrogate women like that".

Or maybe I just didn't feel like indulging your snide attempt at well-poisoning beyond the response I gave. Bad practice to reward bad behavior.

More comments

You are the one who brought in "cuckoldry", which is normally understood to denote your sexual partner being taken by somebody else (and possibly you enjoying the (f)act). What did you mean, then? The fantastic cuck chair hypothetical you wrote after makes no sense either if you are really only using the phrase as hyperbole for "I would prefer her to not have sex, but I subsidise her having sex" and nothing more. Would you really be using the same vocabulary if we were instead talking about your cat getting it on with the neighbourhood strays when you did not want to deal with kittens?

Also, I don't see how wanting your son to be tall/athletic is anything like not wanting your daughter to have sex. One will get someone who shares your genes laid more; the other will not.

Most of this I recently covered here.

Would you really be using the same vocabulary if we were instead talking about your cat getting it on with the neighbourhood strays when you did not want to deal with kittens?

That does in fact sound like the kind of microhumor that would be well-within my personal Overton window. If I owned a cat that got knocked-up by some neighborhood strays and I recounted the story and wrote here that I got cucked—maybe there'd be some peal-clutching from those who don't like such types of (micro)humor—but I doubt there'd be salty comments demanding to know why I used "cucked" in such a manner and asking me if I want to fuck my cat.

Also, I don't see how wanting your son to be tall/athletic is anything like not wanting your daughter to have sex. One will get someone who shares your genes laid more; the other will not.

Along the lines of what @erwgv3g34 said—most men, if they could help it, do not one want their daughters getting "laid more" outside of marriage. Even for sons, there are limitations to this. Some men, albeit a minority, want their sons to wait until marriage akin as they would want for their daughters. Just instinctively, without any mental calculus, I wouldn't want a real or hypothetical son to be banging hookers, single mothers, or ugly chicks, even if there's no physical consequences and that means he's getting "laid more."

Also, I don't see how wanting your son to be tall/athletic is anything like not wanting your daughter to have sex. One will get someone who shares your genes laid more; the other will not.

The concept of "getting laid" does not make sense when applied to women. Any women who wants to have sex can do so by the simple expedient of spreading her legs. Men have to actually work for it.

Given this, the bottleneck for women's reproductive success is not having sex, which again any woman can do, but having sex with a man who has both the ability and the willingness to stick around and provide for her and her children and protect both from harm.

A woman who has sex with men without taking those facts into account is rightly derided as a slut or a whore, and she and her children would die out in the streets if the state did not steal money at gunpoint from productive, hardworking men to support her bastards.

I think there are two separate though somewhat linked questions in the whole debate over Vivek's recent extremely controversial post:

  1. Is it good to let foreigners immigrate into the US? If so, which foreigners?
  2. Is it good to import the Asian work model?

I think that the answer to #1 is a very complex one and largely boils down to what you value. Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors. A lot of one's answer to this question will depend on whether you want to maximize your at least short term market value and are willing to accept a sort of socialist nativism to try to maximize it, or whether you value other things more. There are also obvious questions of the possible dilution of culture by immigrants, fears of future race wars, and all sorts of complicated issues.

I would like to focus on #2. Is the Asian work model actually better than the US one? To me, the answer is pretty clearly no, and this is what offends me mainly about Vivek's post. The whole idea that Americans are too lazy and we should have a work ethic more like Asians.

I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.

But does it even bring objectively better economic results? To me the answer seems clearly to be no, it does not. Take Japan for example. It has had more than 70 uninterrupted years of peace and capitalism, yet despite its Asian work model, it has never managed to economically catch up with the US. Now to me it seems clear that Japan is in many ways a better place to live than the US is - it has much lower levels of violent crime, it seems to have a better solution to finding people housing, and so on. But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture. I see no fundamental reason why Japanese could not adopt a more Western type of work model while also retaining the low violent crime rates and the better housing situation.

Japanese have less per-capita wealth than Americans. If working constantly was truly superior, then why do they have this outcome? Of course America has many advantages, like a historical head-start on liberal capitalism and great geography and winning wars and so on. But it's been 70 years now... the geography is what it is, but certainly modern Japan has not been plagued by a lack of capitalism or by wars or by authoritarianism. If they slave away working so hard, or pretending to work so hard, all the time, then why are they still significantly poorer than we are? To me this suggests that the Asian work model is not essentially superior to the Western one, and it would not only be personally damaging to me if we were to import it here in the US, but it would not even make up for that by yielding better economic outcomes.

But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture.

I'm not so sure.

The (East) Asian work culture is in part a model for economic labor: overall, it seems to be best suited for transitioning away from a low productivity regime to a high one, after which point it manages to stumble through okay but not exceptionally.

But it's also a social model. You hear about crazy hours etc., but those are in large part inflated, with large spans of doing nothing. What the hours do is bind the worker to a larger collective. Even aside from idle hands and all that, the social connections formed working act as a kind of behavioral safety net, particularly for men who would otherwise end up doing antisocial things. You have authority figures you have to answer to. You face shame for not meeting some minimal standards. You have to be presentable, and you have to develop the executive capability to at least physically turn up somewhere at a specific time. A large part of your limited social budget is forced to be spent with a more diverse group than total fuckups.

In America, those same people vulnerable to behavioral dysfunction put in their time doing marginal work before going home to (at best) isolated electronic activities or (worse) go out with people who will exacerbate their worst instincts. Or, increasingly likely, they won't work at all.

It's a kind of socialism that redistributes good behavior. In a world where behavioral norms are hurt far worse by the bottom 25% than helped by the top 25%, that's a massive win. (A variation of this argument applies to education as well.)

Is the social aspect separable? I don't know of a place where you can get the social benefits while moving to a better work model, though I'm all ears if you have an example in mind.

But it's also a social model … What the hours do is bind the worker to a larger collective. Even aside from idle hands and all that, the social connections formed working act as a kind of behavioral safety net

This is an intriguing take, and one which I had never thought of before, but it makes a lot of intuitive sense! This blog post by an American who purports to have spent extensive time working for Japanese organizations, gestures at a similar idea. Do give it a read, if you haven’t already.

I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.

Isn't the clearest evidence of a dysfunctional life model, by right-wingers own lights, the cratering birth rate of East Asian countries?

It doesn't seem difficult to draw a straight line correlation between the two.

It's also unclear to what extend a small country model is applicable to a larger country. Does the East Asian model work without the United States to lean on?

East Asia has some pretty big countries…

Is it good to import the Asian work model?

USA isn't doing bad productivity wise in comparison with Asian countries. The hyper competitive nature of Korean especially society might be related to their really low fertility rate.

But I don't think that what Vivek is advocating is the Asian work model. They are looking to justify mass migration by claiming that workers are higher quality and willing to work for worse conditions and pay. The later is true, sometimes subsidized with welfare.

It isn't good for American workers if the norms change in that direction.

Since the claim is more about justifying 1. that is unavoidable. The massive economic elephant in the room in regards to migration is the discrimination against white Americans that was already a problem and would increase with more Indians migrants who have this narrative of their superiority, as a means of justification. This discrimination is part of the current situation, and caused in part by the influence of not only the migrants themselves who discriminate such as Indians who are especially nepotistic, but also of many who have this pro migration philosophy that is strongly associated with progressive stack type discrimination. See here as an example: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/

In relevance with 1: this blog addresses it in more detail: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/increasing-skilled-immigration-is

But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture.

But are the Japanese actually that much more hard working than Americans? This model might represent in part some Asian migrants or some Asian communities, and also in part just exaggeration.

I am not convinced it represents the "Asian" norm. There is something to it with Japan and Korea and some practices among some Asian migrants. But even then when it comes to Japan in particular, considering that Americans are hard working, I am not sure that Japanese are more hard working.

I would say that Americans are already a hard working people who choose to balance working longer and harder over vacations in comparison with the rest of the world. Including when comparing their practices with European countries. Even if there was some economic benefit in doing so, putting the balance even more in the work category seems to not be worth it considering the trade offs in other facets of life. This model is more related with bragging and the more desperate situation of migrants. But such people are also of lower human capital and also subsidized by welfare and benefit through discrimination policies.

But a part of this is due to oligarchs wanting cheaper labor who they can more easily get rid of. They might also desire to force workers in general to adopt these standards and bring wages down.

A culture that is too hyper competitive can also lead to people wasting time to prove superiority in internal competitions. If smart people have fewer children due to that then the end result is negative. Therefore, it would be a bad idea to adopt such norms.

There is actually a potential, like some of them did in the past, for a left that isn't anti-native, to take the side of its own native labor. I am not a leftist economically, but there is a balance to this. Certainly 8 hour week and some level of worker rights is not valueless.

Historically there was slavery but there were also even children that weren't slaves working in abysmal conditions and dying in the industrial revolution. While a balance that allows productive work over laziness is good, it isn't a good idea to allow oligarchs to push for norms further in the direction of desperate workers willing to accept terrible working standards.

They are looking to justify mass migration by claiming that workers are higher quality and willing to work for worse conditions and pay.

Supposedly, very hypothetically, H1B workers are legally required to make prevailing wages. It's explicitly not a wage suppression scheme. But, I have had horrible conversations with such workers in which they say they would never ask for a raise.

In my practical experience it seems like a wage suppression scheme. Also they can't easily change jobs and if they quit they get deported. So it really seems like a scheme targeted at people like me.

Increasing labor supply drives down the prevailing wages in and of itself (else being equal).

They are looking to justify mass migration by claiming that workers are higher quality and willing to work for worse conditions and pay.

From a certain point of view, labour provided on the cheap IS higher quality labour. If I can hire someone to do 90% of the work for 70% of the cost, I may be able to either accept my 90% as is or use some of the saved resources to get me to the full 100%. This is an abstraction and may not work in all cases, but that's the general idea.

Steelman of two of Vivek’s points:

Americans have been obsessed with productivity for a long time. Search passages by the Founders for “industry” or “industrious” and you will find thousands of hits, often lauding the virtue of productivity. In the early 1900s we had scientific management, described in the 1940s book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen (about the 1920s). The movie is interesting for lauding both productivity and fertility.

Dad always practiced what he preached, and it was just about impossible to tell where his scientific management company ended and his family life began […] Dad took moving pictures of us children washing dishes, so that he could figure out how we could reduce our motions and thus hurry through the task, irregular jobs, such as painting the back porch or removing a stump from the front lawn, were awarded on a low-bid basis. Each child who wanted extra pocket money submitted a sealed bid saying what he would do the job for. The lowest bidder got the contract.

Dad installed process and work charts in the bathrooms. Every child old enough to write — and Dad expected his offspring to start writing at a tender age — was required to initial the charts in the morning after he had brushed his teeth, taken a bath, combed his hair, and made his bed. At night, each child had to weigh himself, plot the figure on a graph, and initial the process charts again after he had done his homework, washed his hands and face, and brushed his teeth

Vivek is also right that we promote the wrong ideal in children. Our sports culture is ridiculous. Children shouldn’t look up to athletes and student athletes shouldn’t practice every day. This has no history in the first century of America, where a sport was enjoyed for its benefits and not as an end in itself. If you were a child in the 1800s you would look up to an historical hero, a national hero, or possibly some business titan. But not a sports player. Consumer sports obsession doesn’t even promote health, it discourages health by demotivating participation in local sports and encouraging sedentary activity.

awarded on a low-bid basis

This is a small number of participants who personally know each other. Conspire to price fix. Of course dad will suddenly refuse to honor this system. But at least it defeats his system.

What about inducing young men to be regimented, putting the team in front of self, and creating situations to bond?

Seems to me the problem is local sports have devalued competition.

Does school not regiment them enough? It’s definitely important to learn teamwork and to bond, but you can do when everyone merely plays sports, without making it an obsession that requires 1000 hours of skill training. Have a sports competition every week and control each time for skill, so that each time has a nearly 50% chance of winning. This incentivizes the prosocial qualities, plus exercise, without all of the waste. And having guys organize these themselves is better than having a coach tyrannically dictate everything — I don’t think most training has enough downtime to truly bond, or allow enough argument to truly involve teamwork.

Random question about US history - when did US high school and college sport become driven by semi-professional spectator sport? In the British schools which take team sports seriously (now mostly the more trad private schools, admittedly) the core of "Games" was and still is ubiquitous intramural competition, with the unathletic kids expected and supported to participate at their level. And if there were enough pitches, an external match would include "B" and "C" teams so as many kids as possible could participate extramurally. But school matches normally happened on games afternoons when the people who were not playing would be competing intramurally - not spectating. Typically most of the spectators at a British school football game would be the parents of the players.

Does school not regiment them enough?

Arguably not at all. A core component of regimentation is the idea of the regiment, IE being part of a larger whole.

Kids generally aren't trying to score higher on a test to bring the class' average up, they're doing it to bring their own average up.

If you were a child in the 1800s you would look up to an historical hero, a national hero, or possibly some business titan

I dunno. Britain had a recognizable celebrity culture around boxing (see e.g. Pierce Egan's Boxiana) and cricket (Aubrey-Maturin, Flashman--by convention the only legitimately citable fiction) by 1805 or so. My initial reaction was to wonder whether the same thing was in the water supply in America, or whether instead this was an under-discussed difference between the two. Thinking about it some more, though, I reckon that this stuff is properly considered as adjacent to animal sports (a famous early boxer was even nicknamed the Game Chicken), which were surely popular in the colonies--Andrew Jackson bred racehorses and so forth. Which doesn't necessarily contradict your point.

That cricket was an enjoyed pastime and some man developed a reputation for being good is not the same as the sports-celebrity culture today. Boys can name twenty athletes at minimum, they watch most of the games of their favorite team, buy the jerseys and shoes, play FIFA (315 million* copies sold) or Madden (130 million copies sold), invest significant childhood time on competitive sports. I doubt middle class children in England grew up worshipping pugilists or cricket players.

And I mean, maybe pugilism was prosocial when your destiny as an illiterate lower class Englishman was to soldier overseas or die of malaria; it instills courage and desensitivity to pain. But that wasn’t the world of the other classes, and now we are all in these other classes.

Nothing I've said is a knock-down argument against your historical claim, but you're scarcely providing any argument for it either, just a lot of pointing and spluttering about "kids today" and bald assertions that it couldn't possibly have been so in days gone by (coupled with trivialities about modern mass media and so on). As a side note, projecting the modern concept of childhood back to a time when midshipmen were routinely commissioned at 13 is a chancy business.

some man developed a reputation for being good

At least in boxing, it was a good deal more than that. Champions dined with royals, drew aristocratic sinecures, and seem to have been household names (to the extent that any names were household names in a pre-mass-media era). John Gully, for one, became an MP. I recall references to news of prizefights and cricket matches being avidly sought after by East India Company men. All very recognizable.

invest significant childhood time on competitive sports

"Significant" and "competitive" are rather weaselly words, but the aristocratic boarding schools certainly expected participation in their house games (Rugby football was officially codified in the 1830s and played for generations before that) and it doesn't seem to have been uncommon for aristocratic scions to play nationally competitive amateur cricket by at least the 1830s. Have you read Tom Brown's Schooldays? Well worth it for its own sake, and may shed some light on early 19th century British sporting culture. Hell, I'd recommend Boxiana as well, albeit perhaps as toilet reading due to its episodic nature.

maybe pugilism was prosocial

I make no claims whatsoever about pro- or anti-sociality, to be clear.

I can’t offer any definitive proof that @coffee_enjoyer’s claim is correct, but as someone who spends a great deal of time dealing with 19th century American primary sources and who has read many autobiographies of men and women who grew up in that time, I’d say the lack of sports idols rings very true to me.

Newspapers were ubiquitous back then, serving not only as disseminators of news but also fulfilling the role that social media plays today. If you want to get a good sense of regular life during the 19th century, you can hardly do better than to just read 19th century newspapers. If you do, you’ll notice a striking absence of sports news. By the end of the century, a medium-sized newspaper might have a page or two per week devoted to their local sports teams’ games, but usually hardly more than that, while smaller papers didn’t even have that level of coverage. And if you read autobiographies of men and women who grew up in America in the early- to mid-19th centuries, you’ll typically find many references to playing sports, but few to no references to any sports idols.

This is in part because there weren’t any major sports leagues at that time. The first professional baseball team wasn’t founded until 1869, the first professional football players weren’t paid to play until 1892, and the first professional basketball league wasn’t founded until 1925.

All that said, while I think coffee_enjoyer is correct about the lack of sports heroes, I think he’s kind of wrong about young boys’ real heroes back in that day. Sure, they learned about great men of history and were taught to admire and emulate their virtues, but I don’t recall ever reading of a boy who had any real gripping, emotional connection to those men, as many boys do with sports superstars today. Instead, going by memoirs and autobiographies, most boys’ idols seem to have been older brothers, fathers, upperclassmen, teachers, fashionable young men around town, etc.

See, this is fairly compelling! Thanks.

most boys’ idols seem to have been older brothers, fathers, upperclassmen, teachers, fashionable young men around town

Many of whom were at least locally distinguished in folk sports (e.g. wrestling), it seems to me, but this is of course quite different than modern spectator sport culture.

Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors.

"The economy" is not just an abstraction. Benefitting the economy doesn't mean line going up, it means cheaper rice and McDonalds burgers and cars and phones and AI girlfriends for the American working class. It's interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians with exactly enough IQ to barely write python. The effect on wages depends on the occupation - in theory, allowing in a hundred thousand seasonal fruit pickers should make everyone better off overall, but would lower the wages of existing apple-pickers. But allowing in a hundred thousand javascript monkeys should, because everyone's better off overall, raise the wages of the native fruit pickers! And it's harder to feel sorry for the heritage American FAANG engineers or accountants who'll make 85k a year instead of 95k a year because of Indian competition than it is the 'working class'.

interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians

It's not "interesting" at all, it is the same principle being applied consistently.

That is that importing labor from overseas dillutes supply/lowers wages and that this is a bad thing. IQ doesn't factor into it at all. The principle holds regardless of whether we are discussing fruit pickers or python coders.

Though as an aside, having a background in mathematics and computer science i would question the assertion that writing code in python is a "high skilled" job.

The whole point of my comment is that overseas labor does not lower wages overall. It raises real wages overall, by the basic econ 101 logic of comparative advantage and specialization*. It lowers local wages in specific specific sectors where there's a concentration of foreign labor. But by that same logic a concentration of labor in CS is good for farmworkers.

i would question the assertion that writing code in python is a "high skilled" job.

The irony there was intentional - most H1Bs are significantly above average skill, but hardly top 1%.

*I mean in the relatively small amounts from the H1B program here. At larger amounts you could get 'their culture is bad / their iq is too low to work in our economic system' effects, but not at small amounts.

The whole point of my comment is that overseas labor does not lower wages overall.

And i don't buy it. Especially when one of the core arguments in favor of importing foriegn labor is that it's cheaper/more cost effective than hiring Americans. I have yet to encounter a compelling argument for why the rules of supply and demand shouldn't apply to labor.

The rules apply to specific sectors! But they don't apply to the economy as a whole because, in a sense, every action everyone takes is labor. So adding more labor doesn't reduce the real "price of labor", because the whole thing we're doing is exchanging our labor for the labor of others. Adding more labor reduces the price of labor in dollars (assuming the amount of money in circulation isn't actively adjusted based on the amount of labor, which it does, but whatever), but that doesn't matter because you don't have a fixed amount of dollars, you have a fixed amount of time to spend doing labor! So reducing the price of labor in dollars reduces the amount of money you have, but you can buy more with it - nominal vs real wages. And then what matters from importing new immigrants is whether they make the economy overall more efficient, and in general specialization and comparative advantage means it does.

In general, all economic arguments against immigration in general, without respect to immigrant characteristics, such as the one you're making, are also arguments against pronatalist population growth. And population growth doesn't seem to have been bad for America's economy historically. Arguments that take into account immigrant characteristics work better!

Just to be clear.

You are asking me to believe that it is impossible for changes in the supply of labor to the effect the price of labor.

It would seem to me that history is rife with counter-examples.

... I am arguing that, absent changes in the money supply, it reduces the nominal price of labor, but not the real price of labor?

Like, the population of the United States 3xed in the last 100 years. This was a huge increase in the supply of labor. But it did not reduce the 'real' price of labor, or the value of the goods and services that we consume, because labor creates those goods and we exchange our labor for the consumption of those goods, which balance out. And then the second-order effect on the nominal price is specialization, but that's the main effect for the real price. Again, absent concerns specific to characteristics of immigrants, like culture or genetic ones, which are reasonable. But your argument applies equally well to population growth via new births reducing wages ... and it ... doesn't do that.

I kind of want to say that a lot of people here have a blindspot in their reasoning for anti-immigration arguments, in the same way that people on the left have a blindspot in their reasoning for anti-racism arguments?

I have yet to encounter a compelling argument for why the rules of supply and demand shouldn't apply to labor.

They do, that's the "lowers local wages in specific specific sectors where there's a concentration of foreign labor" effect. If you want an intuition pump for how that doesn't lower (real) wages overall, consider that money isn't real, it's just an account of value. Some total amount of goods and services are produced in the economy, and the more goods and services are produced per person, the richer the average person is.

Completely agreed. American tech workers are seriously overpaid relative to other developed countries. It should be made clear to them that either they compete for jobs on a fair footing with the best from all over the world or else they'll be the immigrants applying for the job because now it's based in London.

  • -11

American tech companies make enormous profits per employee. I'd say they are underpaying their workers. I don't count Europeans being underdeveloped as an excuse to increase the profits per employee of American tech companies by cutting wages.

American tech workers are seriously overpaid relative to other developed countries.

No they aren't.

Now, you might say that this is merely me making a naked assertion, negating the naked assertion you've originally provided. But in fact, I can back this assertion by pointing to a) the market producing the salaries you consider excessive, and b) the relative success of the American companies providing those salaries versus foreign tech companies employing foreign workers.

Further, it's interesting to me that you are so transparently hostile to the one segment of the American economy that offers be best and most obvious hope for widespread economic growth and prosperity. How much poorer should Americans in general be, in your view? Which class seems to you to enjoy appropriate compensation?

Is it Quants?

I am not hostile to tech, I actually like it a lot; in fact my day to day job is basically as a ML-esque programmer and if needs be with a bit of retooling I think I'd be able to transition to somewhere like Deepmind if push came to shove. Tech is basically my long term exit plan from finance and so I have a personal interest in seeing it do well in the UK/Europe beyond the general benefits to humanity that removing barriers to trade have. The people I'm talking about being overpaid are not OpenAI/Anthropic engineers (they are appropriately paid) but the ones who don't understand shit about computers but get paid $150k+ to stack frameworks on top of frameworks until hey presto the compiler shits out yet another CRUD/advertising app. Meanwhile my friends with PhDs in computational biology who went into biotech are earning like $60k in the UK and the lucky ones who managed to land a position in California are earning $90k-$130k.

Just because the rest of the developed world shoots itself in the foot with regards to overregulation which leads to US companies winning by default doesn't mean they deserve their excess profits any more than a monopoly that doesn't get challenged deserves its excess profits. They got lucky by being born on the correct piece of soil where the government in charge doesn't regularly commit self harm and now they wish to protect the fruits of this accident by birth even though it directly hurts Humanity if a US programming job (where the lack of overregulation leads to a higher force multiplier in how much good the worker is able to do for the world) goes to a mediocre American vs a talented Briton.

Quants are underpaid relative to the value we generate for the capital employing us but that's a discussion for another day. Plus the discrepancy between US vs UK quant pay is small enough that you can genuinely say that people choose to forgo a little bit of money for a better ambiance while the gap for tech is so high that it only makes sense if UK tech developers (amongst which group I count many friends) are artificially prevented from moving to greener pastures, which is exactly what is happening.

The ad apps, while simple and presumably beneath an intellect of your caliber, make value for the capital employing them. Yet you do not think that the people who make said apps should be paid based on the value they provide the capital employing them:

The people I'm talking about being overpaid...the ones who don't understand shit about computers but get paid $150k+ to stack frameworks on top of frameworks until hey presto the compiler shits out yet another CRUD/advertising app.

But you, the noble quant, should be judged by that same value. And in fact you are underpaid for your value to the capital employing you:

Quants are underpaid relative to the value we generate for the capital employing us


UK tech developers (amongst which group I count many friends) are artificially prevented from moving to greener pastures, which is exactly what is happening.

Have you considered that maybe its because all your really talented British developer friends aren't actually really talented? Maybe they are actually kind of dumb? Like there is this supposedly really lucrative thing they can do, its so easy they can "shit it out", they don't even need to know how computers work, they have the app store in the UK so they don't even need to be in California, but like... they don't actually do it?

Just because the rest of the developed world shoots itself in the foot with regards to overregulation which leads to US companies winning by default doesn't mean they deserve their excess profits any more than a monopoly that doesn't get challenged deserves its excess profits.

There it is. Its you. Claiming to know who deserves what. That's what it always boils down to.

American everythings are way overpaid relative to the rest of the world.

Yes, but American Software Engineers are especially so even compared to other jobs.

The American tech sector has a big advantage though.

The jobs aren't moving to London because you don't want to even try in Europe (including the UK, since the attitudes aren't that different even though it's not in the EU anymore). You will be regulated to death immediately. Europe follows a mostly corporate (in the old sense) economic model. There's little room for entrepreneurship, and that's by design, even though few politicians would openly admit that.

The whole Indians debate is perfect example of why high skilled immigration is a bad idea.

The side pushing for more Indians is largely Indian with another prominent figure being Elon who is an immigrant himself. The America first crowd is noticeably more rooted in America. US politics is devolving into the farce that is democracy in Iraq. They don't really need elections as they could just use the census data to assign seats to the Kurdish party, Sunni parti, Shia party etc. The system isn't going to have any long term visions, any cohesion or any sense of national interests. It is going to be each little group squabbling to maximize short sighted self interest.

Agreed. We need another 40 year period of extremely low immigration in order for ethnogenesis and assimilation to occur.

But Elon did clarify the amount of immigration he thought was necessary to maintain US dominance and it's not high. He's talking about 15,000 people per year. Current immigration is at least 100x greater than that.

We need some common sense reforms that make it easy for true geniuses to move here without allowing legions of low-skill H1Bs.

If Elon only wants 15,000 of the best of the best, then the current EB1 and O1 visa processes should be sufficient. EB1 is a green card "for highly skilled foreign workers who have extraordinary ability, are outstanding professors or researchers, or are multinational executives or managers" with a quota of 40k per year, and O1 is a three-year, extensible-until-end-of-contract nonimmigrant visa for "people with extraordinary skills" which admits about 20k per year (22,430 and 23,680 people admitted in 2014 and 2015).

So it sounds like Elon is lying, and wants more than 15,000 individuals. I presume his incentives would be in the direction of having more employer-dependent skilled labor visas like the H1B, but having a higher quota and making them more predictable (remove the lottery, approve faster). This puts him at odds with MAGA.

EB-1 and O-1 are heavily slanted towards academics. The criteria are not good for working software people, probably not for working engineers either.

Thanks. The only person I know with an EB1 works at Apple, so I assumed its usage was roughly equivalent to H1B.

At the risk of repeating the same points I make every time Tiger Moms come up, I think the traditional elite Anglo work model (largely neglected in the US and UK since WW2) remains the gold standard for producing top-quality elites. A strong emphasis on polymathy, including physical excellence; deep language skills as the no-bullshit zone of the humanities; debate and public speaking as a proving ground.

This is the kind of education I benefited from, and to which I attribute most of my virtues (my vices, on the other hand, I take full personal credit for). Sadly, as a parent I've found it's almost impossible to buy these days; the kind of solid upper-tier English private schools I attended in my youth are now rarae aves, and at best offer slightly more personalised and 'nurturing' versions of what you'd find in any American or European state school. Probably you can still get the old recipe at the right boarding schools, but those come with their own headaches.

deep language skills as the no-bullshit zone of the humanities

Could you expand on what you mean by this?

You can just pull shit out of your ass about what dickens meant by whatever. But if you try that with, say, French, everyone will realize that you don’t speak French.

Mastery of Latin, Ancient Greek, and (to a lesser extent) contemporary languages is something that can't be faked or bullshitted in the same way as argumentative essays. Being able to translate Thucydides or Cicero requires significant time investment in learning large amounts of vocabulary and complex grammatical rules, as well as cross-textual and historical knowledge. Because elite-status in the humanities used to be gated behind being able to do these things, it served as a selection mechanism for the humanities that meant that 95%+ of people couldn't cut it, and the humanities had a way of choosing a genuine cognitive elite.

You can't fake foreign language mastery the same way you can, say, literary analysis

ChatGPT enters the room

Timed and invigilated exams rise up to counter ChatGPT.

Sure. That is of course a solution. But a much more costly one.

Mastering Latin and English?

how do you "master" English? Or any language? I think all of us speak, read, and write it pretty well, but there's always room for improvement.

Watch a few sessions of Prime Minister Questions and listen to how they use the language. That's mastery of the language in my ooinion!

The curricula at modern top public schools in the UK seems to offer students more choice, but at most it still seems possible to have a largely ‘traditional’ education - cricket and rugby, Latin and Greek, classical civilization, literature and math.

Where were you educated?