This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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).
The irony, again, exerts itself, though I doubt you'll recognize the applicability (or nested irony) of citing your earlier post.
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.
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 options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link