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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27866 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles. Indian H1Bs, to me, have an odd spot in which the Indian American success stories that come to mind are the Satya Nadellas, the Parag Agrawals. Custodian elite bureaucrats who are incredible at 'playing the game' of office politics, but relatively few narratives of actual personal innovation and development.

The narrative coming down to arguments around international competitiveness and the 'best of the best' feels silly when a large chunk of the roles that are filled by the imports are managerial within developed businesses or the creation of further dashboards to track clickthrough rates on advertising. This is hardly Werner Von Braun developing rocket science

I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles.

Agreed, as @Stellula suggests above there seems to be a semantic bait-and-switch going on. What's being sold is something like Operation Paperclip or the Rockefeller Foundation's Assistance to Refugee Scholars program that brought figures like Werner Von Braun, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Alexander Solzenhitzen to the US. What we're actually getting in practice, is a bunch of minimally competent third-worlders who are, to all appearances, contemptuous of Western norms/values, and more concerned with extracting value than producing it, and who's only observable contribution to the community is diluting the supply and thus lowering the wages of native-born code-monkeys, medical professionals, finance bros, Et Al.

I consider myself reasonably "Based and MAGA-Pilled" and I am totally onboard with the former, while being deeply opposed to the latter.

I'd sooner accept a 100 immigrants from Central America or Sub-Saharan Africa who sincerely love baseball, apple pie, and everything else American over a single immigrant like @BurdensomeCount as even "low human captital" is of greater value than negative human capital.

Just want to endorse the second part of what you said. It’s probably some of my Catholicism leaking through here, but I am explicitly not a white nationalist. I am an “American nationalist”. We’re a Christian country, we like guns and big trucks and big tits and bikinis and apple pie and baseball and chicken wings and bigass rockets and we consider the moon our sovereign territory. We hate the government, are naturally suspicious of authority.

That has all led to the most prosperous, most badass nation on earth and if you want to be an American you can, but when you get here you need to assimilate, and part of that means having a near-contempt for the country you fled. I don’t want to hear you talking about your ex girlfriend old country for 3-4 generations.

Maybe that’s a good analogy. Imagine you meet a girl in an abusive relationship with a loser guy. You fall in love with her and help her move from the slums to a giant mansion on the coast.

Now imagine she refuses to be seen in public with you, goes to her exes house for holidays, and talks to you about having dual citizenship a polyamorous relationship with her ex, who she also keeps sending remittances money to. Now imagine she also wants to talk about your toxic masculinity (which saved her) and the problematic nature of your wealth.

Yeah no thanks. We’re down to marry the super models (Werner Von Braun), but not so much the cheating gold digger.

I get the impression that you and I agree on much and would get along quite well offline. That or we would bicker endlessly like siblings. ;-)

For my part, I have always been partial to Teddy Roosevelt's bit about "Hyphenated Americans".

Maybe we already know each other but are behind seven boxxies alt accounts and won’t ever know it.

I once found out I'd lived in the same house as a motter thanks to his description of the insane landlord. It's more likely than you think with how filtered we are by irl interests and professions.

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