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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28169 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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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

Disagree, immigrants come and typically work far harder than Americans who are comfortable and lazier. Those are the people with the pioneering spirit, willing to build something new for their families. That’s why immigrant groups outperform Americans economically in so many different fields. Vivek was right.

A huge part of the immigrant performance story (which is silly to discuss as one group, but the successful groups) is their propensity to cluster in our already very high income cities that also tend to have high salary floors for mildly successful white collar workers. If these groups were really embracing pioneer spirit they would be far more over-represented as 1st founders of risky businesses. Given their income and educational attainment, they aren't crushing that metric at all.

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.

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