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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.

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.

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.