site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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.

8
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

There's a strong scientific reason to be against H1B entirely, even if it increases GDP:

  1. Humans only developed the ability to form social groups because it benefitted gene proliferation. Community, society, and civilization are intrinsically tied to what benefits human gene proliferation.
  2. H1B and other forms of immigration actively damage the reproductive success of Americans because (a) our national fertility is low, (b) rival nations have a comparatively enormous population and take in few immigrants, (c) they take the highest wage jobs, (d) they take up physical space in the territory and (e) they accrue political power.
  3. H1B violates the only reason we are able, as humans, to form countries and organize socially at all, making it a rare case of an objectively bad evolutionary decision.

A funny hypothetical illustrates the point. Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success. We have lost in the deepest sense, because we have betrayed the whole purpose of cognition. Rather than making America competitive, we would have forever lost the evolutionary competition which designed our very minds. Probably because evolution selects for intuitive prosocial genes like empathy (flip-side: out-group prejudice) and not just raw abstract pattern recognition. We would have lost the game of life, and gained a small footnote in the future Hindi history of the world. We would have even reneged on the first words God ever spoke to us — “be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth”.

Obviously, 200 million is excessive for the point of a thought experiment. But this just means that the damage occurs to a lesser degree. Indian Americans are 1.5% of America, the highest paid group in America, and the fastest-growing demographic. Let’s say that a generous .1% are geniuses who have aided American military might. This reduces American reproductive success by at least 1.4%, arguably more because of the higher socioeconomic position. The greatest risk is that they begin to use their high earnings to lobby for more Indians, which seems to be happening presently.

I find it hard to believe that this arrangement is even in the evolutionary interests of “elite human capital”. If you are Elon Musk, you have more genes in common with the average American than the average Indian. If Elon is crowned Eternal King of India and begins the genetic proliferation that befits a medieval royal — along with a haram of beautiful nubiles — it’s doubtful that he would ever reach the level of similarity that he already has with Americans generally, and Northern European Americans specifically. So what is even the biological point? It makes no sense from a scientific point of view. It is a form of biological self-harm.

It’s weird that no one actually brings up the science in these discussions, only the economic studies. But the economic studies are only valuable when subordinated to and weighed by biology. Okay, economists are saying that if we add the Indians then the CEO gets another ski home… but the biology is quite clear that this is ultimately not in anyone’s interest, even the CEOs, and goes against natural design (both evolution and God). If you guys really want the ski homes then we can invade the Himalayas.

There is pretty good evidence that immigration has next to no effect on wages. It may even be slightly positive. Everyone who complains about immigrants suppressing wages seems to think that labour demand is fixed. Growing the population increases the supply and demand for labour about equally.

The idea that immigrants take up too much physical space also seems absurd given that Americans congregate in places with higher density. Being around people is a net benefit. There is lots of empty space for those who disagree.

  • -10

immigration

We are talking about a very specific type of immigration which takes a somewhat higher income job. Which analysis did you read that focuses on H1B and first subtracts all of these immigrants from the “effect on wages”, eg the effect on non-H1B wages? When Elon hires H1-B for Tesla, do you really think that (checks net worth) he would not be able to spend 20k more on an American? It’s either H1-B or he closes shop? The profits and net worths of the highest H1B recipients prove that it is a way to hoard profit for owners and investors.

immigrants take up too much space is absurd

If humans tend to congregate around urban areas, which they do in both America and horribly dense India, then there is limited space for them, which means… they take up space. “Find a coding job in North Dakota” is not a real criticism here. The Indians can just as well find a job in the Himalayas.