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 -
Here is my attempt to conclude the h1b debate given the takes in on have been just bad.
The H1B debate seems to have died down in the same way every other debate dies down: things remain the same. Trump does what a liberal from the 90s does, and MAGA people claim victory over lip service. Academic Agent wrote a very succinct write-up on this issue, and my take on this is mixed.
I would not have wanted migrants in the millions to a country I was a native of, period. White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions. They may be stable sometimes on the right but they will eventually break away. Sriram, the trump appointee who started all of this was a Kamala donor up until a month before the election and was not a good programmer by his own admission, certainly not an AI guy like Ian Goodfellow either. The h1b meltdown took Elon down too as he ended up losing arguments, banning anyone named Groyper and then publicly admitting defeat somewhat to calm people down, though things are unlikely to change by a lot. Elons issue was covered by eternal Pariah and sometimes really insightful Chuck Johnson so do check it out, he also detailed Srirams issues in this post.
Vivek Ramaswamy too burned some of his social capital like former MLM peddler Patrick Bet David by asking the youth to follow cram school routines like I did and compete with the rest of the world in terms of labor and uni admissions despite the very obvious issues of them cheating and having excessive ethnic prejudices to begin with. I have first hand experience with cram schools which funnily enough neither of them does and that explains why they glorify it and those who went through it cant forget the ordeal fast enough.
I would never want such large-scale movement of any people into my own nation but otoh I will not call most Indian migrants scheming scamsters or ethno-nationalists either. I might try to move to the west in 2025 and likely temporarily to see what Rome of today is like but I am a self-respecting person and a nation choosing its own people and demographics over hard to prove claims about the benefits of 20 billion Americans is a very sane outcome. There are plenty of good Indians, them leaving is explicit iq shredding and people back home gloating about how tech firms have Indian CEOs is a massive sign of insecurity.
Political change and human endevaors work on ingroups and outgroups, coalitions, the tech bro aligning with that gets its memes from identitarians was not going to last that long and the results will not be that different from 2016. People choosing to move to the west, starting a family there and if they are really good at what they do is a massive plus as long as the number does not exceed thousands as demographic changes are nearly impossible to overturn. Many posters here are honest hardworking white collar employees who work on visas and I would not want them to be called names anytime they log in. There are no good answers here, including Trump's which is handwaving, inaction, minor lip service and then letting things happen as they already are.
Biocapital is very real, society here runs not just on caste but also on class and there is a keen awareness amongst people of both. Indian biocapital is bottom of the barrel and clustering helps eek out better performance than what it could have otherwise but topsoil erosion won't last forever, I reckon most of it has already been used up. Indians move because they do not like most Indians, they do not wish to associate with them but being in a liberal democratic world reduces your identity down to the lowest common denominator. If I ever move out permanently, it would be because political power back home is not a possibility and I would rather live as a nerd in the big leagues than in the little leagues. The future here is incredibly bleak btw and I know many posters here who have similar backgrounds and moved out. I think they did the right thing.
I wanted to conclude this post with some reasonable course of action but that is highly unlikely. People here have a hard time believing that upper castes bottled India so badly that the nearly extinct remnants of their elite genepool is gone like their ability to gain any power yet they just sat down and took it, and now you have an ever-worsening system that chugs along without ever collapsing.
A collapse may never come, it did not for the past 2 thousand years, the US too would still "survive" even if Yglesias's harebrained schemes of one billion Americans came true though surviving like India or worse Pakistan or Bangladesh or Afghanistan is humiliating. My interest in politics began because of affirmative action here and how people would allow explicit laws like the SC ST act, once I saw the rest of the world I realised that things are far more universal than I thought they would be. Anyways i dont think there is a lot more to the debate, there are plenty of good people living here, under normal circumstances, I would in fact prefer if they did not move out but if I dont have an ingroup back home soon enough, I do think they should do what the Zoroastrians did when they came here, in both cases, people should kick out and sue the living shit out of Indian IT sweatshops and be far harsher migration wise but then again nothing ever happens.
I feel a sense of deep unease writing this, I do not want to offend friends I have made here and fuck my career over, I do not want them to be called names either. I am semi-anonymous here because this forum is the only place I can be honest and muting myself here like I do irl is bad, lying is even worse. Lying to yourself is how you get takes like Bryan Caplans on India.
As I said in a downstream reply, this is all a diversion. H1-B visas represent 85K per anum of imported workers. US universiteis graduate 850K STEM students per year, so it's basically and additional 10% of skilled workers added to a market that isn't nearly as tight as people think. H1-B Visas are not an issue, they are a solution to the wrong problem.
The problem is an open border across which millions (almost 3 million in 2024, from a basic Google search) of people cross and only
250k (8-9%) get sent back. That is an all-time high number of deportations. In other words, ICE is working at full capacity to "repatriate" migrants and it's a drop in the bucket. Closing the Border is the first step, sure, but sending people back simply isn't going to happen, not in any meaningful way that conservatives hope for.So, how do you goose those numbers? go after the low-hanging fruit, i.e. the people you can find, who you already know follow the rules, and send them back.
The H1-B debate is a distraction so you don't notice that nothing will actually change.
Prediction: mass deportations will not happen. If we currently deport 250k that number will not rise above 350k. 85% confidence.
I don't think so. The precise number coming in right now is irrelevant when they were proposing an expansion of the program, and when the "but they're here legally" argument was already deploy to dismiss concerns over small towns being flooded by Haitians.
the "but they're here legally" argument isn't meant to dismiss concerns. It's meant to highlight that the government is limited in it's ability to throw people out and the legal ones are always the easiest. The debate is a distraction. Republicans need to be able to show at the mid-terms that they "threw the bums out that Biden let in." They will dump numbers on us. Those numbers (people kicked out of the US) are already higher than they've ever been and unlikely to increase without a mass mobilization of the ICE, cops, Border Patrol, every sanctuary city and the military. But you know an easy way to juice the numbers? send back the people you actually have some control over and all you have to do is let their visas expire. Boom!
This is a time honored American tradition, the same game from here-to-eternity. People hate H1-B fine--whatever. I sincerely don't care. Just don't be fooled into thinking this is the real discussion. It's a preliminary distraction set to prime voters for the mid-terms.
That's now how I remember it. When Trump/Vance brought up Springfield, I saw people deploy the argument in an attempt to point out hypocrisy ("but I thought you guys said you're only against illegal immigration"), literally no one said "we'd love to deport them, but it's easier to start with Mexicans.
It's not. The establishment really really wants more immigration in the west. They were getting it illegally all these years, but now that the negative sentiment against it is becoming unmanagable, they're looking for ways to still get it under the guise of legal immigration.
Well, I don't presume it would be easier to throw out Mexicans--I'm saying it's easier to throw out people you gave H1-B visas to as opposed to people you can't find because you don't know who they are or where they went. they aren't merely here legally, but have been granted the esteemed blessing of the state, which can be revoked at any time.
The US will have immigration always and forever. It's not a switch, it's a dial. The Biden admin, cranked it so far the knob came off. Whether or not H1-B should be expanded, decreased or eliminated is not a conversation of consequence. We're talking sub 100k numbers not multiple millions. The real immigration issue that voters care about --the millions of voters who crossed party lines or got off their asses to vote for Trump--is the open border. Almost no one cares or even thinks about H1-B visas. It was a foolish topic to even bring up--unless, of course, you're trying to muddy the waters and misdirect people's attention.
I think we can squish this into a prediction space. I don't care about H1-B visas but my prediction is "no change" (+/- 10k total approved visas) with 75% confidence. I think I predicted overall deportations somewhere else, but I expect that number (currently around 270k) to grow by no more than 10% by the midterm elections, 85% confidence. I think both H1-B will not change meaningfully, deportations will not grow meaningfully and the conversation will be about a failed discourse around H1-B to obfuscate the failure in securing the border and deporting the mass of migrants from the Biden era. I suppose we can make a bet if you want, or just see how I did in two years. I wouldn't hate to be wrong...
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