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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26794 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Twitter had a very interesting few days before Christmas, we even saw the return of the huwhite man Jared Taylor to Twitter, which is a fairly surprising thing. I try to not post about India but this is kinda important and has to do with the US so here we go.

In the h1b debate, the point about country caps for skilled migration in the US recently picked up a lot of steam. Trump appointed Sriram as Senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence and his tweets about the removal of h1b caps caused a lot of chaos. David Sacks and the entirety of the tech platoon was defending Sriram, the removal of country caps and ultimately sacks tweeted that Sriram will not control the vias issues since his department is AI.. Many also pointed out Srirams tweet where he openly advocates for active IQ Shredding. Spandrell who coined the term IQ shredders as an example makes a case against such migration as in the end both nations lose bio capital, sriram for instance believes America to be an idea over a people and is fine with all smart Indians leaving en masse which will drop the average iq permanently here. They won't have kids in the US either and the US will have to keep incentivising more people to join to keep up the rate of tech innovation.

India has the highest wait times for h1b visas due to having had IT sweatshops and plenty of fraudsters hustle the legal immigration route. You see most H1Bs coming from three states of 29 here and IT sweatshops which make the backbone of the Indian IT sector indulging in absolute fraud to the point of regular fines spanning more than a decade, fun fact, the founder of Infosys is Former English Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks Father in law. It is a difficult thing, India itself has had anti-migration sentiments within the country as the largest IT hub Bangalore has people routinely asking for fewer migrants as they are not Kannadigas, the local ethnic group.

The political class, however, was unanimously criticising it. Blake Masters, another Theil Capital person turned politician, even asked for the total removal of H1Bs and only keeping O1 visas. All factions of the right did this, including Andrew Torba, Zionists like Laura Loomer, dissidents like BAP, Captive Dreamer and ofc Groypers.

Full disclosure, I am an Indian guy who is in tech, I am still in my home country and cannot comment on this topic without being called a self-hating Indian. India has fat tails and a lot of Indians are not politically scheming migrants, at least not the competent ones. I can't lie about this on an anonymous forum here since I don't like lying but inevitably I also cannot say this publicly as I don't want decent people to get cornered. I am an Indian dude who very likely may migrate after all. It is far easier to simply generalise groups, Tutsis or Yorubas are simply seen as Africans. The Amerikaner is correct but if you are an upper-caste male here, you will never sniff political power, anyone who is smart will be made to live as a nerd and might as well be a nerd doing cooler stuff in a better society than live here and be treated like garbage.

Trump is unlikely to curb the h1b but the most likely outcome will still be more Telugus and other south Indian states having a small number of sweatshops gaming the migration in the US even harder like Gujarati and Punjabis in Canada and rest of the anglosphere.

This whole debate between Elon and the rest of the right hinges upon what people understand the purpose of a state to be.

Is it an ideological organization like the Comintern, the Ummah or Christendom (or e/acc aerospace/digital foom)? Is it a commercial area, devoted to making the green line go up? Alternately, is the state a suit of political power-armour for a nation, devoted to advancing their national, ethnic interests?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1871978282289082585

The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.

Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.

Elon is in with the neocons, the fundamentalists and the woke on this one, he lacks a national concept for the state.

At the end of the day, I believe in the nation-state as the fundamental unit. Blood is thicker than ideology, you can see Chinese recruitment officers (who somehow got into the US military) say on Tiktok 'obviously I'm not going to fight against China' - maybe some other wars. Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation as the US has experienced and is experiencing. And it corrodes the necessary spirit of sacrifice. People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes. If migrants make a logical decision to migrate to a richer, more lucrative economic zone, they'll likely make the logical decision to leave when the going gets tough. On a collective level, logical individual decisions are no good. It makes more sense to evade duty and responsibility - but then you end up living in a poor, unsafe and weak state, you're worse off than before.

The US has mostly avoided these problems because the going never got tough. They were bigger and better than everyone in their region and enjoyed allies who did most of the hard fighting in the big wars. Even then, there have been significant political problems in America due to a lack of ethnic homogeneity. There can't be any race riots if there's only one race present.

Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda it's actively shrinking. Turning a nation-state into an economic zone corrodes its integrity.

Elon is an important figure that is forgivable on this particular issue. He was abandoned by his home country.

If he was more right he would go further.

Blood is thicker than ideology, you can see Chinese recruitment officers

Meanwhile Russians and Ukrainians spend years in grinding battles against their own extended family members due to their allegiance to a nation state.

People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes.

Sunni Islamists of all races appear to be very happy fighting together for an ideology.

Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda it's actively shrinking

Recruitment shortfalls for Anglo armies over the last 40 years correlate extremely strongly with periods of great economic prosperity. The 90s also saw recruitment struggles. The last time the British Army easily met its targets was 2010, long after the UK became an economic zone but at the trough of the unemployment wave caused by the financial crisis.

Nations are also abstract causes, come to that.

A dyed-in-the-wool ethnonationalist (which I assuredly am not) would argue that a nation is, literally, an extended family, i.e., the biological descendants of a specific group of human beings. There are many problems with this argument, but being abstract is not one of them—except, I suppose, insofar as any super-Dunbar group of people is an abstraction.

except, I suppose, insofar as any super-Dunbar group of people is an abstraction.

Subjective groups beyond your cognitive limits to maintain would certainly qualify as more conceptual than evidential in my book.

The idea of filling up your elite with people who left their home land for a better economic deal that isn't even that much better is absurd. The US is filling the upper class who would ditch their culture, homeland, family and friends for 2-3x salary increase. The US elite is going to drift far from the general population if it largely consists of rich arabs, Vietnamese computer nerds, wealth Chinese business people, eastern European jews and other groups who find Milwaukee as relevant as a white guy in Singapore finds Bhutan. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the US is deeply divided when the elite view the country as a vehicle for their own personal success and have no real ties to it.

That’s literally the entire concept of America, we’re a country of people who had the resolve to cross oceans to seek a better life. Every single one of us apart from the Native Americans and those descended from slaves meets that description.

Now we’re suddenly going to rewrite it?

who had the resolve to cross oceans to seek a better life.

It's a nice story but the world has changed. Oceans have shrunk, they're now about three podcasts - or a good-sized audiobook on double speed - wide. On top of that, people have way more access to their original society than in the past. This works for America, in terms of how many people are Americanized, but it doesn't just work for America.

The world is smaller, more nations are willing to cater to expats looking for a low tax rate.

America is still the best deal on the table and shows every indication of remaining so (so they're net importers of the Sunaks and Scheers of the world) but there are substantial differences from whatever idealized sort of migration or migrants from the good old days you're appealing to.

It still takes something to uproot your life and move to a new country and culture 1000s of miles away from everything you’ve known.

It’s a big part of the reason why immigrants so often outperform native stock of Americans economically. They’re the people who were willing to dive in and risk charting a new course.

The common counterpoint to this is that they mostly just come here because even an illegally-low wage is still more than they can earn busting their butts back home. I wonder if "we shouldn't pay the cost for other countries being poorly-run" would be a strong counterargument to immigration.

It is not. The concept of America is being pioneers. Joining an established place where prosperity exists is unamerican in many ways. A Ugandan attempting to start a moon colony is at least somewhat American. The same guy moving to New York is basically 0% American.

So now literally nobody is American in America since there aren’t any frontiers left in the country.

Many people still embody the spirit of their pioneer ancestors.

Nobody more so than immigrants in my opinion

Starting a new life in a foreign land

Is not pioneering in any sense when that country is more developed than your own. It is, in fact, the opposite

More comments

Rather it was communities from western Europe who wanted to have their own states where they could have their values and their way of life.

And they built one who’s principles y’all now question.

If you wanted a blood and soil type country with deep ethnic roots you can try to move to one. The US is a pretty bad option for those who do like that sort of thing.

It was communities from the British Isles who subsequently dealt with catastrophic, culture-destroying immigration from the rest of Europe, sure. That America is rich in spite of that is an achievement, but it’s ridiculous to pretend Ben Franklin and the other founding fathers wanted America to be a melting pot of every European nation from Tromso to Odesa.

What do you mean British isles? You literally would let Irish people in? That’d erode the fabric of the nation.

I think that large scale Irish immigration was highly deleterious for the US, but it’s happened now and they’re largely assimilated, plus Ireland is now rich enough (and still quite a small country, with a now-low birth rate) that ongoing inflows would be minimal. Plus there were always some Irish in the US, although more at the start were from Ulster or Protestants/settlers in general.

In what way was it deleterious?

Curious because I’ve never actually heard a serious argument that it was!

It’s a problem for electoral systems in general. You don’t win by loyalty, in fact loyalty is often detrimental to the project. Being of, by, and for the people doesn’t matter, in fact the opposite, as the money lies in selling out the people to global interests. What matters is the ability to imitate the people enough to not trip alarms while you work to sell the country to the highest bidder while using propaganda to convince the people that all of this is to their benefit.

I don’t know that changing the demographics changes much, if anything I think it might accidentally help as it becomes increasingly obvious to the public that not only do the elites not care about them, but often have no serious connections to the actual country or its citizens. It might be possible for white guys with American accents to convince Amerikanners that they’re on side and not working for international interests. It’s not going to land nearly so well when the same “free trade! More immigration! Stop practicing your culture and religion you bigots!” Rhetoric comes from people with pajeet or mandarin or Arabic accents living in coastal global cities that have nothing in common with what average Americans people want.

It's like Vivek read this and said, "hold my beer"

https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

Seems like he's torched his political career, or at least presidential ambitions, in one post.

Does he really think sports culture doesn’t celebrate achievement? It might not celebrate a particular kind of achievement but competitive sports are in fact meritocracy.

I do think Vivek has a point that Americans have gotten soft (eg participation trophies) but the point is that softness influences everything; not just math.

Seems like he's torched his political career, or at least presidential ambitions, in one post.

On an unrelated note, It's funny, surprising, and interesting how much of Trump II politics is taking place before he even got inaugurated.

Seems like a dumb argument. In Indian popular culture the hot male action hero who saves the girl is no less a Bollywood trope than a Hollywood one. I doubt that in Indian colleges the math Olympiad champ is more popular than the person who has drugs and money and throws big parties.

I also don't know how "nerd representation" is in any way lacking in recent US media.

And I agree with the right, even though it is an unpopular opinion to take. I don't want my friends who are not obvious scamsters or posess a sense of dual loyalty to be discriminated against but the fact is, most Indian migrants see the West as a shopping mall or a tax holiday instead of an actual place. There is no way to have this happen now, India has a worse image than china, a nation that has had espionage issues since forever.

I remember three to four years ago when I would post stuff here, I would not see the Indian Question brought up because there was little chest thumping, now you have Prime Time Indian anchors making claims of dual loyalty, in any scenario besides that of more leftward momentum, this will only get worse.

Demographics and loyalty make up a state, this is also why I support smaller feudal states over larger nations, not just the threat of leftism but because loyalty does not scale. India was never one people, it always fractured.

Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda, it's actively shrinking. Turning a nation-state into an economic zone corrodes its integrity.

Yes it does, there are no good answers, I feel quite blackpilled. Hindu right always made some pajeet jokes but it was never serious, twitter is officially in race war territory and the same arguments that Indians made against demographics and other communities are being recycled for them. The worst part is that all of this could have been avoided. I would have preferred had they not abused the shit out of these systems. The good ones could have left and assimilated into the west, at least that way someone who is genuinely very competent would have been able to contribute to the world instead of rotting here which they do not deserve. This seems less probable now.

This could have been prevented, all of it.

I don't see why we can't allow for the existence of states founded on different principles, whether they be nation-states, empires, theocracies, multiethnic city-states, or transhumanist online network states. Let Europe reassert the primacy of blood and soil if they have the stomach for it. Let Arabs or Turks reform the Caliphate if they can. Let wealthy elites carve out little Singapores of their own in Africa and Latin America. And let America be the un-nation whose tradition is to oppose tradition. If one of these forms is so much better than the others then the choice between them will be as obvious in the end as the choice between East and West Berlin. Online nationalists may say it's already so as they rush to post comparisons of downtown SF and some medieval village in Germany, but the smartest and most ambitious Europeans are still flocking to the former, so I would say the outcome is still uncertain.

As for Chinese immigrants specifically, I'll just point out that one notable Cold War blunder was the FBI's mistreatment and detention of Qian Xuesen under false allegations of being a communist agent, which led to his actual defection and establishment of the Chinese rocketry and ballistic missile program. It has also always baffled me that Iran hasn't been able to build nuclear weapons, despite the fact that I've met enough brilliant Iranian graduate students that I could probably put together a nuclear program of my own. The answer as near as I can tell is, apart from Israeli and American sabotage, that all the Iranians smart enough to build an atomic bomb simply hate the government and would rather live literally anywhere else. Sending such people back home to be drafted or tortured into making WMDs would be a massive self-own.

It's a bad idea to send talented people off to rival countries, I agree 100%. But don't you see the pernicious problem that emerges? You end up in a situation where you can't be sure of people's loyalties. Or worse still, you end up manipulated into harming your own interests. McCarthyism didn't emerge from thin air, it emerged from the US leaking nuclear and technical secrets like a colander, from Soviet spy rings basically running key parts of the US government for several years. It was a great blessing of the US that they were facing a smaller, poorer opponent with an economic system that didn't work.

Harry White caused insane, ludicrous amounts of damage to US interests. He sabotaged US aid to Nationalist China in WW2, he helped outline the Morgenthau plan that so greatly stiffened the German war effort in 1945, he handed over lots of secret documents to the Soviets. Just one traitor in high office can do immense damage and there were a bunch of them, check out the Venona intercepts.

If migrants make a logical decision to migrate to a richer, more lucrative economic zone ... the US has mostly avoided these problems because the going never got tough.

The US avoided that because it assimilated those migrants efficiently enough that by the time things got tough, their grandchildren were already fully American.

The going has never gotten relatively tough in America since 1812. If your grandparents were producing offspring in 1812 you were basically born in 1855 and by then America was as good as any place on Earth other than the most prosperous parts of England, and the boat ride over there sucked. By the next generation it was basically parity (again parity with the world power of the time) and trending up with much more land and opportunity for your progeny.

The number of people who have lived in America that would have been better off had their parents not come is pretty small. The number of children of those is basically rounded off to zero.

I think in 1855 it was probably fairly uneven. The Eastern Seaboard sure, but not tons.

Still, broadly agree.

Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation

The general irony of the post, but this line in particular, is the Christmas present I didn't know I needed. Truly it could only have come from a self-identified Australian who regularly cites Chinese tiktok as a representative and reliable source of information, who has been an impassioned advocate of deferring to American geopolitical offensive-realists, and whom routinely uses collective self-identification terms with American and European audiences from nearly the literal opposite side of the globe.

(Another irony for non-Australians in the audience being that if you are to rely on the Ranger's opinions to shape your own, you would be opening yourself to treachery and manipulation from a foreigner, the best way to guard against being to disregard any foreigner's opinions. Self-negating advocacy at its most unintentional.)

I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests. I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to. I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

It's common sense.

Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group. There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.

Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.

I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to. I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants

Bruh, it's the country that routinely robs/imprisons/executes their co-ethnics. Immigrants from China hate the CCP more than anyone in mainland China ever could because they know how it is from the inside.

Says here Chinese immigrants are more favourable towards China than opposed (albeit not by much): https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2023/07/19/chinese-americans-views-of-china-and-other-places/

The US has been putting out enormous amounts of anti-Chinese propaganda and they still can't get net unfavorable! In mainstream media, when's the last time you heard a story that presented anything happening in China as good? For about 8 years now the media has been declaring nothing happens there but tyranny, economic disaster, plague, debt trap diplomacy, stealing all the fish, imperial expansion, growing military, pollution, dumping cheaply made _____ on world markets, slave labour...

Surely there must be some good things happening in China. What about them building a space station, that's pretty cool! Or releasing some open-source AI models? I'm not saying that China is good on balance or that the media should be more pro-Chinese but that there is a huge and powerful propaganda effort against China that has totally worked on everyone in the West. Except people from China.

In the US, there is an obvious countervailing force that encourages non-white ethnics to treat their ancestral land as some sort of totem animal, which they are honour-bound to defend. In the light of that, you may be observing something like "Aztec empire puts out big information campaign about the dangers of jaguars in the jungle. Everyone now reports a bad opinion of jaguars, except for the Jaguar Warriors. Should we be worried that they will sell out their fellow humans and go live among the big cats?".

(This takes especially curious turns when the monolithic "Asian" identity means Korean-descent kids protesting the Japanese embassy for letting white people try on kimonos at a Monet exhibition, when average actual Koreans tend to wish the US had cancelled Japanese culture after WWII as punishment.)

Maybe they have those view because China is not, in actuality, good on the balance?

Feels like a Russell Conjugation: I educate, you persuade, they brainwash.

I'm genuinely confused now, I thought it was common sense that people were favourable towards coethnics and their homelands. Isn't that the whole ingroup thing in a nutshell?

Or Chinese spying, is this a niche topic? I'm not one of those 'China can only copy our tech' people but they do a hell of a lot of spying on other countries. The whole Aschenbrenner thesis is predicated on the assumption of huge Chinese espionage efforts. In Australia we had Senator Dastyari who was found to be taking money from this Chinese investor in Australia, suddenly he started moving towards Chinese positions. This kind of thing happens in the US too, high-ranking officials were found to be sleeping with spies.

I'm genuinely confused now, I thought it was common sense that people were favourable towards coethnics and their homelands. Isn't that the whole ingroup thing in a nutshell?

This isn't compatible with even the most cursory reading of I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, the fact that your ingroup may not be ethnically similar nor your outgroup ethnically distinct from you is literally one of the first thing he addresses.

I've always felt that one also pairs nicely with Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers

Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese – and still have absolutely no point.

Chinese robbers is very relevant to the Outgroup bias when dealing with social media and groups of scale, as with enough scale you can always find outliers and then signal boost their prominence, particularly when there's availability bias shaping access to information.

I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests.

You do, however, need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese, or that 'many' is 'most' as opposed to 'a small ratio,' let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.

This is the typical smuggling of the conclusion that goes on with ethnonationalist constructs, both in the self-identification (what is an 'ethnic chinese') and in the external identification (the observable versus unobservable nature of loyalty) and in the cost-benefit (whether the costs of PRC-loyal ethnic chinese outweighs the benefits of non-PRC-loyal ethnic chinese).

I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to.

You do, however, need reliable and accurate sources. Particularly, you need reliable sources that can accurately distinguish between 'ethnic ties' and 'familial ties,' as the former has significant organizational and societal implications than the later.

If, for example, you take an ethnicity-based caution, then there are categorical exclusions on the basis of race to positions of trust / the armed forces, which in turn comes with the social and political complications of embracing formal racial discirmination on people for potential actions regardless of guilt, even if they are avowed enemies of the regime. If you take a family-based caution, on the other hand, then perhaps you don't give security clearances to ethnic han with family members in China who can be used as leverage against them, but you can employ people who lack said families in China (or whose families were purged by the CCP).

This is particularly so when much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state, including a non-trivial number being exiles of the current ruling party for issues in the current living memory.

I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

It would be amusing to see you fail to a practically textbook Chinese robbers fallacy, which was memorably coined for its statistical implications of the availability of non-representative examples.

Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group.

It is, however, a distinct cultural group, and a national group, and a political-identity group, and various other forms of groupings that make it distinct, foreign, and unreliable to other [groups] due to the divergence of identity, interests, and expected activities, despite nominal genetic commonalities.

No one is particularly confusing the Australians for the Germans, or the Brits and the French, despite their ethnic commonalities. (Not least because the vague concept of 'ethnic' stretches as far or as narrow as needed for the argument of the moment.)

There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.

A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner and so benefit from in-group bias sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of trust and persuasiveness over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties and interests (because they are a foreigner).

Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.

The irony, again, exerts itself, though I doubt you'll recognize the applicability (or nested irony) of citing your earlier post.

People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes.

I’m not a hard ethnic nationalist, but I think honestly some caution is required in making the assumption that especially for first and second generation immigrants m that they retain no loyalty whatsoever to their homeland. A Chinese immigrant spent all of their formative years and probably beyond that being Chinese in a Chinese nation and in a Chinese culture. His attitude towards just about anything you can imagine are shaped by that, and it doesn’t go away just because he’s been walking around New York or Silicon Valley for five years. And the stronger the ethic and religious identities are, and the less enforcement of assimilation there is the worse it gets for creating loyalty to the new country. Muslims in Europe don’t seem to be very loyal to their new countries, in fact they’re doing their best to subvert those countries into being Muslim countries and are willing to use intimidation and propaganda and so on to get there. Thus, I think at this point, I’d be very cautious about letting first generation immigrants have access to levers of power or knowledge that can be sold off to foreign countries that may or may not be hostile to us. No, I don’t think it’s paranoid to keep Chinese and Iranian engineering students away from sensitive technology and information, especially military and cutting edge computer stuff. Of course in the 21st century, it’s heresy to say that Iranian engineering students should not be allowed on American nuclear submarines no matter their grades. I would consider it common sense.

And I don’t see how any country can survive if they’re giving away the levers of power or their greatest military and technology resources to people with no demonstrated loyalty to the actual country. If you don’t care what happens to your country or its people, at best it’s going to end with those people choosing personal interests over those of the country and at worst will choose other loyalties they may have over the interests of people they don’t care about. Even without the threat of family back in China who would face harm, but even without that, they are open to bribes and corruption because they’re here for their own reasons, mostly for some form of personal benefit.

Sure. This is a measured take. Familial ties are real, childhood upbringing is influential, and they impact things.

This is not, however, an argument of inherent ethnic loyalties overriding all else.

Moreover, it's also not approaching a policy argument of the tradeoffs- costs, benefits, opportunity costs, and so on- that go on with addressing policy questions on, say, college research. Particularly when the actor these people may hypothetically support is using them as complimentary, as opposed to primary, sources, and you do not actually have a monopoly on information control.

China, for example, is generally understood to conduct not only human espionage (asking ethnic Chinese to do things), but engage in routine cyberespionage against not just governments, but commercial actors, including almost certainly universities. (I say almost certainly because attribution is hard.) If the same thing is stolen from all four sources by different means- by the Chinese student, from the university the Chinese student worked at, from the corporation commercializing the research, and from the government that was funding the project / holding the data- then the Chinese student is not, actually, that important to the loss of information.

To be clear, it is a thing, but the nature of information security is that you have to be secure in all zones, and the adversary has to only succeed in one for all the measures taken to fail. There are, in turn, different policy implications for whether you can expect to control the loss of information versus if you cannot. If the student would go to another university at home but get the same research data thanks to theft, there may be an (in)efficiency cost with that for the adversary but it's not like the student isn't getting their hands on the data anyway.

This makes the strategic competition less about 'can students get the data'- the assumption is already 'yes'- to 'who benefits the most when they get their hand on the data.' In other words, who benefits the most- not exclusively- from human capital.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute maintains a Critical Technology Tracker intended to track various critical technologies and who writes the most cited papers on them. This includes their human talent flow tracker, which tracks where the authors of those papers went for undergraduate education, graduate education, and follow-on employment.

From a strategic competition perspective between states, even if you doubt the trustworthiness of these students, the optimal allocation is not 'more educated students employed in the hostile country.' Instead, you want to minimize the number of employed top performers in the countries you want the least benefit. Just like you can't control / maintain a monopoly of the information, you can't maintain a monopoly on the employment prospects of the students. That Top Producer of Cited Research is going to be employed somewhere. You can't feasibly prevent that.

What you can do- and where the cost-benefit tradeoff comes- is shape where they work.

Yes, a Chinese student doing industrial theft is bad. That is both a cost (loss of profits) and a relative loss (gain to the Chinese CCP). But if the cost is going to be incurred in some form regardless (alternative modes of theft), is it a worse cost than the gains of employing the student yourself, and denying them to the competition?

Or- put another way- is China benefiting more from a student-who-could-be-a-rocket-designer being a possible corporate spy facilitating the occasional IP theft, than by having them home being a senior rocket designer?

For a strategy game metaphor, in strategy games there are occasional tradeoffs between an ability that provides a buff with no downside, and another ability that provides a greater buff but with a downside, such as reducing health in exchange for greater offense. While the actual best option is context-dependent, as a matter of human psychology a lot people instinctively shy away from assuming known costs, even if they would be better for it. (Such as the health debuff actually letting you kill more enemies before they can hit you, saving you health despite an upfront cost.) Loss-aversion is real, even if the losses accepted enable greater profits / reduce greater lasses.

This is- loosely- analogous to the costs/benefits of brain drain of foreign students and would-be experts. There are costs to the receiving party / benefits to the sending policy, but these alone do no make refusing the costs an ideal position.

What it should mean- in a reasonable exchange- is setting reasonable limits of cost-benefit tradeoff.

You don't want Iranian students to be on nuclear submarines? Sure. But how about the experimental reactor design program? It's not exactly enabling Iran to go from non-nuclear to nuclear. Or how about Fusion? If that is invented, it'll probably be the fastest-stolen tech in history anyway. Etc. etc.

But once we get to this point of discussion on 'which jobs,' we're already accepting the premise that letting them in has merit in the first place, as opposed to the opposite.

If the same thing is stolen from all four sources by different means- by the Chinese student, from the university the Chinese student worked at, from the corporation commercializing the research, and from the government that was funding the project / holding the data- then the Chinese student is not, actually, that important to the loss of information.

By that reasoning, none of the four sources is important to the loss of information and generalized, nothing at all is important.

Not quite. It's not that nothing is important, but rather that certain objections start to lose value when they amount to special pleading rather than an actual standard of differentiation.

Think of it as analogous to swimming in the rain. Not wanting to go outside when it's raining because you don't want to get wet is fine. Not wanting to go swimming because you don't want to get wet is fine. But if you are getting in the pool, getting out because it's raining isn't compelling on 'because rain gets you wet' grounds. There may be other grounds of leaving- a storm, a need to prepare other things for the rain, what have you- but the specific 'because I'd get wet' basis isn't compelling if you're already wet.

In decision-cost frameworks, costs cease to be disqualifying objections if they're shared across the proposed courses of action. That doesn't mean costs aren't worth controlling.

More comments

need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese

No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language. You can draw up all these hypotheticals (what about this family, five generations of pure ethnic Chinese who've been living in the US their whole lives and have never been to China or speak Mandarin really, they're not really Chinese are they haha!) and they will still be irrelevant to the general case. Use wisdom!

let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation? The line from me that you quoted? The answer is obviously 'yes'. The question is not 'can you accurately produce counterfactuals over nearly a hundred years accounting for endless second-order effects', which nobody can answer, least of all social sciences papers.

much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state

So along with the patriotic Chinese we have the Falun Gong and similar who, if anything, have even more of an incentive to manipulate and propagandize. No, national policy should not be influenced by foreign grudges but by national interests. The US manages lobbying extremely badly, so I wouldn't expect you to understand why it can be a bad thing if you have your country's elected representatives wearing foreign army uniforms or describing how their first priority as secretary of state is to help a foreign country.

A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of influence over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties.

A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.

It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.

No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language.

Yes, you do need to provide studies that support the motte position you are claiming if you want to claim studies support the motte you are claiming.

Particularly when one of the more influential past works that forms a foundation of the community ethos you are posting in is on the Chinese Robbers fallacy, which is always relevant to topics that mix media posting and China and would also be applicable to gish galloping examples that do not prove population-level assumptions.

Another foundational work being I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, which reviews why ethnic solidarity is not the pre-eminent automatic loyalty determining factor for in-group/out-group dynamics.

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation?

You may be, but no.

We were talking about the amusing mix of irony and self-awareness for you to argue for a presumption of suspicion of treachery and manipulation on the basis of foreign origin, when you are not only a foreigner to the majority of your audience, but you routinely express credulous confidence in foreign-controlled social media known to try and manipulate foreign audience perception at an algorithmic level, and you regularly praise foreign policy thinkers who make exceptionally blunt arguments of the properness of manipulating foreigners-to-them like yourself for their own nation's benefit.

A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.

This, too, sounds like something a foreigner would say to manipulate other foreigners with whom they share no shared identity or loyalties. Truly, such foreigners should be viewed with suspicion and their potential contributions to the community of one's own should be rejected out of hand as obvious manipulations to influence. Particularly when so heavy handed as with the amusingly blatant use of forum pejoratives tailored to the sub-audience.

(I shall update my list of accused pejoratives to now include 'critical theorist,' which will sit nicely next to the 'neocon,' 'neoliberal,' 'fascist,' and other such ideological slurs. Unfortunately, American was already included in my (multi)nationality mutt pedigree.)

Unfortunately, rejecting such foreigner influence out of hand would require incorporating the influence of said foreigner, which would not be rejecting the untrustworthy influence, hence categorically invalid on its own premise.

It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.

Unless you have put on an unprecedent amount of weight over Christmas feasting, you are not Australia, and no one would particularly confuse you for a continent, a nation, or about 26,000,000 other people of various ethnicities, of which only a minority are even ethnically Anglo-Celtic.

I also highly doubt you have ever in your life shown up for even a single American war, based a single American solider in your home, provided the Americans any intelligence function, or made a single decision in the Australian defense community that would warrant anyone to identify you, individually, as an 'ally' of the US, as opposed to someone who lives in the geographic landmass of Australia with a hobbyist level of interest in geopolitics.

I'll leave it to other self-identified Australians of the forum to say whether you are representative of Australians in general. You are certainly not representative of various wings of the Australian foreign policy establishment.

Can you dial down the contempt a little bit? You are great at long-form arguments and there is nothing wrong with taking apart someone's post, but trust me, you don't need to layer the condescension on that thickly for the subtext to get through.

Sure. I'll even disengage from this topic and any not reply to any replies from him for the rest of the year to clear the air.

Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard.

To be sure, that is because the French were completely screwing the Aussies over with that contract.

No, it is because of corruption. The PM who trashed the French deal in exchange for the comedically terrible AUKUS one (America is entirely within their rights under the contract to take our money and give us nothing in return) has an incredibly plumb job with one of the American companies that are going to be profiting from that deal (look up Scott Morrison).

The French were also laughably corrupt -- they kept not delivering anything while raising costs and pushing back dates. If that was permitted to continue, it's not clear what stopping point they'd have ever found.

you can see Chinese recruitment officers (who somehow got into the US military) say on Tiktok 'obviously I'm not going to fight against China'

Could I have a screenshot of this, or an article about it?

Not quite sure what video site it was on but here it is. Since then it's been deleted. Here's some clips, possibly selectively edited. You can see what I'm talking about though:

Speaking Chinese to a Chinese audience: "I'm from Shenyang, I got a foreign language proficiency notice, I make 10K a month, I can retire at X date, I get Y pension. Being a soldier is just a job, no matter who you work for. US Army doesn't say that China is bad, it's fine, they don't indoctrinate you. If you get based in Korea, you can maybe go on holiday to China on a 4-day holiday. 'What would I do if the US and China go to war' - well they probably won't go to war, nuclear war makes it unlikely. But if it does happen I will definitely quit the US Army, wouldn't join the Chinese Army because I wanna keep my US citizenship but I'll do my best to help the Chinese people, wouldn't help the US against China (or help China against the US???).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rCI830ZIJd0

This is not what I would call a loyal attitude, nor is it desirable. The MSS would be unable to restrain their smiles as they see this guy on his four day holiday in China! Is the US Army an Army or is it a mob of mercenaries going in for lifestyle perks? The mob of mercenaries might be OK against hopelessly outgunned foes, it's not suitable for gruelling warfare against serious opponents. You can't just desert if it gets tough, being a soldier is not a normal job.

There's nothing in particular that comes to the mind from the last decade or so of western military reporting, so nothing systemic at least, though I am also interested if anything is provided. (Edit: Provided information did not demonstrate any systemic pattern, and was a single alleged ethnic-Chinese NCO claiming he wouldn't fight for US against China or vice versa. Motives appear to have been familial rather than ethnic, and amounted to neutrality on claimed terms.)

However, this is more likely to be an extension / reflection / TikTok propaganda perpetuation of the ethnic 'Chinese story' approach of China's diaspora policy, which seeks to utilize / cooperate / encourage ethnic Chinese in other countries to adopt pro-PRC narratives.

PRC ethnic-chinese diaspora policy has multiple roles. Part of this is to maximize the benefit to the PRC from ethnic chinese out in the world, but another part is to encourage / cultivate the perception-conflation that (ethnic) Chinese = China = PRC = CCP. What's less obvious is that this doesn't just work in so much that it convinces ethnic chinese in the diaspora (so that they believe that there is some duty owed to the PRC), but that it also works when it convinces the non-ethnic-chinese of other states.

Ethnic chinese are encouraged to be distinct, rather than assimilate, and the flip side of this is that the PRC benefits from a 'don't try to assimilate them' suspicion / caution in other parties. It's not so much that they want there to be an actual significant amount of anti-Chinese hostility, but certain amounts of distrust and hostility lets the CCP present itself as the guardian of the ethnic chinese diaspora, garnering local influence and letting them set up proxy influencers, even as it can use those ethnic chinese influence groups to lobby / try to influence the local state.

Going back to this tiktok- the claimed ethnic chinese officer claiming they wouldn't fight China (...note that they are allegedly in a recruiting position, not a combat arms branch), is almost certainly not representative, if they even exist. But encouraging the perception that ethnic Chinese military members can't be trusted would be a exceptionally beneficial propaganda line to signal boost if there was even just 1 example (or invent if there was not).

Note, also, that this is a pretty banal sort of ethnic-solidarity / national diaspora propaganda that you can find in any general ethnonationalist / conflict-adjacent context. In the 20th century, the German diaspora was not only a factor in the WW2 pro-Nazi sympathies in places like Argentina, but even earlier when before WW1 German enclaves / business interests in Africa were used as pretexts for the (late) German colonies in Africa. In WW2, it's far more remembered how few ethnic Japanese in the US tried to support Imperial Japan, but that wasn't for a lack of trying on pre-war Imperial Japanese efforts to mobilize ethnic japanese across the Pacific. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm Australian; that the PRC's been trying to co-opt the diaspora is common knowledge here. Interesting point regarding playing off "infiltrator" instincts, though.

Am I correct in thinking that that guy, assuming he really is a US Army recruiter, will probably get in trouble for that? One would assume that this would be in flagrant violation of recruiter codes of conduct, and possibly implicate him in violations of base security protocols.

I'm Australian;

[Insert ad hominem fallacy on an account of foreigner category]/Joking.png

Am I correct in thinking that that guy, assuming he really is a US Army recruiter, will probably get in trouble for that? One would assume that this would be in flagrant violation of recruiter codes of conduct, and possibly implicate him in violations of base security protocols.

You could be correct, but you could be incorrect. It depends on more information than we have.

One of the weird things about the initial claim is that the Pentagon banned tiktok from government computers in 2023 barely a year and a half ago. In fact, there was an Army recruiting scandal in 2021 about use of TikTok when not supposed to. If an American recruiter is doing recruitment on TikTok, he is either doing something very wrong regardless of message/loyalty concern (violating policy), or may actually be operating within approved scopes (is operating within special exceptions).

If it's the later, there may be no violation at all. It may, in fact, even be the point.

More on that later, but it's not like the militaries lacks people who garner contempt for wanting to sit out specific conflicts. Kamalla Harris's vice president pick during the recent US election had the baggage that he tried to present himself as a service veteran despite possibly having arranged to get out of his reserve unit's overseas deployment. It's not exactly hard to find dissent within an institution over 2.8 million strong (standing military, reserves, support civilians), with some people shaping (or ending) their careers to not be associated with some conflict / etc. In past unpopular wars, it wasn't unknown for people to join entire other services (such as joining the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army in Vietnam), or to unceremoniously retire to avoid deployments (in the Iraq War era there was a surge of American reserve / national guard retirements by people who were content to be in the reserves during the 90s when it was considered low/no risk).

Ultimately Ranger's argument relies on assumptions of a separate topic (presentation of loyalties, as opposed to policy adherence) where there's a perception of what sort of loyalty people think is required (members must be willing to fight all enemies and say so!) that is less absolute in practice.

It's less absolute because manpower is not only limited (there has never been an endless supply of ideal candidates), but manpower is often both fungible (one person here can free up another person to go there) and mutually exclusive (person trained for expertise A can't be used in occupation B anyway). Full-throated concurrence with all wars wasn't a requirement in the conscription era (where conscientious objectors / pacifists could sometimes be shunted to support roles, or just put in risk and expected to save themselves), nor is it typically demanded in a volunteer-service model (where service members have some significant influence over their careers as they reach higher ranks, and thus can choose areas where they're not likely to do what they really don't want to do).

There are certainly cases / issues when an expeditionary military says 'go' and the person says 'I don't want to,' but these are both very rare at the level of the recruiter in question, and, uh, wouldn't be present for someone who is a recruiter.

///

Now to return to the point passed earlier, where it could be a context of approved message. (Emphasis on could.)

Ranger's argument works from a perspective of how this is terrible because lack of loyalty and inherent untrustworthiness and mercenaries bad and yada. Ranger is also very clearly not thinking like a manpower-capability developer (i.e. recruitment at scale), but operating from a basis of purity politic demands. Purity politics is bad force generation policy. Even governments obsessed with ideological compliance, such as the Soviets, used a purity-cadre model (political officers) as opposed to a purity rank-and-file model.

Starting from the most obvious, monetary incentives are absolutely a basis of building and retaining talent. This isn't an issue of 'mercenary' pejoratives, it's a point that that in a volunteer service model the military is an employer, and as an employer they are competing with all other employers to recruit and retain. Fundamental disconnect there, and also woefully ignorant of why so many of the common US incentives include post-service benefits, like paying for college (i.e. investing in domestic talent development after getting your military use out of them). This is why in modern history the American military has been often seen approvingly as a 'way up' for underclass Americans- it provides substantial training / more structured environments / post-service education that people may not otherwise be able to afford. It's not a guarantee, but it's a powerful incentive. Someone who serves 4 years and than leaves to enjoy college is not a failure, it's a success story of how you got someone to successfully serve 4 years at the lowest runs of the military and then improved their national value potential.

Part of any recruitment pitch, in turn, comes with conveying the perception of costs for taking the job. If a recruiter says 'you may never go see your family abroad,' then that is a lot of people who might be willing to serve but not if it means they can't serve abroad. Similarly, if a recruiter says 'you must be willing to fight the Chinese state, no matter if the PRC attempts to use your family as hostages,' then again, you are winnowing the field. The US military is designed to fight on 2 different continents at any time, with at least Europe and Korea providing non-Chinese fronts.

Further, a recruiting pitch that can appeal to both hard-core joiners (the people who would be more gung-ho than the recruiter) and the wavering (ethnic Chinese who would share the sentiment of not wanting to join a war against China, but would also not want to fight the US) isn't inviting a trojan horse with the later category, it's getting an asset.

The chinese language is, in a word, hard, and there is generally a shortage in any non-Chinese government of people who can speak and/or read it. As a result, there is a demand that far exceeds the supply in people who can (a) read / speak Chinese, and (b) are willing to do it for the government. Someone who is (c) willing to do it at an enlisted soldier's pay (low) at (d) enlisted soldiers hours (no overtime pay) and in (e) enlisted soldier's living standards (non-affluent) and at a (f) enlisted soldier's 'can be moved across the world to where most conveneient (incredibly high) is incredibly good value-for-money.

There is, in other words, a great many useful / desirable roles that a government wants a Chinese-speaker for, many of them that do not require taking up arms against the PRC even in the course of a war against the PRC. Many of them require no access to sensitive material / networks / resources either.

The role of any human resources / recruiting institution is to try to match potential incoming talent to desired needs, not to refuse to accept valuable talents because it is unsuited for any particular need. 'Speaks Chinese, but is not willing to fight the Chinese state' is not a the most desirable recruit package, but it's a very useful one. The questions / investigations of loyalty / questions of what they are willing to do are real considerations, but they are more questions on how to direct talent to the best cost/benefit position after they joined, not whether to encourage them to join.

They are also, critically, questions that go on well beyond the initial recruiter pitch. As such, a recruiter who is authorized to make such a pitch agreeable to such people, may be doing nothing wrong.

[Insert ad hominem fallacy on an account of foreigner category]/Joking.png

I mean, let's be fair here, I'd refuse to fight the Motherland or Fatherland Britain or Germany unless something had gone drastically wrong in those countries requiring liberation. But if something hadn't gone drastically wrong in those countries, the only reason I'd be being asked to do so is if something had gone drastically wrong here.

Then again, I'm not in the Army (I'd kinda like to be in the Reserve, but I don't think they'd take me).

(Also, yeah, I know Chinese is hard to learn; I spent 3.5 years learning it in school.)

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