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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   38889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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The same way that you might look at a guy with a broken hispanic accent who just attained citizenship saying "shut down the border" is how I look at most people saying "shut down the border". Or the same way you might look at a person, still dripping wet after pulling themself onto the lifeboat and saying "we can't let anyone else on".

You know, unless I had some independent reason to think theyre crazy, I would take that as strong evidence that its in my interest what theyre saying.

And since were doing credentials: My family has lived within an hour of here longer than europeans have been to america.

I knew I shouldn't have included the lifeboat one. Its a terrible immigration metaphor. Our "lifeboat" is an entire freaking continent. So its more like some guy washing up on the beach from a ship wreck and then saying "don't let anyone else come ashore".

But also part of the point is not what he is saying, but how he is saying it. "we can't let anyone else on". Like when did "we" become a "we".

And since were doing credentials: My family has lived within an hour of here longer than europeans have been to america.

I assume you don't live in America? In that case I say "go for it" whatever immigration policy floats your boat. I don't think most countries have a strong enough culture to assimilate immigrants. American culture dominates the world, so most of them come halfway pre-assimilated. And America is generally rich enough to have economic opportunity for them.

Our "lifeboat" is an entire freaking continent.

Really? Because I don’t see too many “refugees” clamoring to get into Mexico (except as a by station to get into America) or heck, how many are settling in the arctic?

Im not a fan of the lifeboat metaphor either because its not about limited resources per se (although crowding is a real concern and net negative - see mouse utopia experiments) but the real problem is obviously the culture fit issue. If you are privileged enough to travel, you can’t help but notice how absolute shite every other non western country is on multiple levels. Pollution, littering, poverty, corruption, crime, the list goes on. Do you truly think you won’t be importing any of those issues? Do I need to bring up my FGM rates in the UK?

Mexico has a far higher standard of living than elsewhere in Latin America and IIRC is a destination for immigration for that reason.

What makes the standard of living? The people or the institutions? Which of the two are fungible? You and I probably share an opinion on this, but it is not the politically correct opinion.

Institutions are made up of people. You can’t switch the people out of the institutions and have them remain the same. Look at the ACLU for a recent example.

Count Canada too and central America is basically a rounding error.

I have been to India. Some of it looked better than Northern Virginia. At least the area I was working in when I was there.

Much of it was worse. But that's why I said middle class immigrants are great.

My daughter is in public school, less than half the kids in her class are white. She is also in girl scouts. It's about 1/3 each of White, Indian, and Hispanic. In both cases it's been fine. In the case of girl scouts I can't imagine a more American organization for little girls to join.

There are enclaves out there where people don't assimilate. Usually it's in New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name].

There are enclaves out there where people don't assimilate. Usually it's in New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name].

Poppycock. I've seen plenty of enclaves, both urban and rural, with distinctive ethnic and cultural differences despite having immigrated over a century prior.

No thank you.

I specifically claimed that there are enclaves where people don't assimilate. Often it is in cities. Your response: "poppycock [exactly what I just said]"

Honestly if you hadn't included the "poppycock" or the "no thank you" I would have thought you were just pointlessly agreeing with what I said.

The rural enclaves all end up speaking exclusively American English within a generation or two. They all heavily consume American culture. Many of them volunteer for the military at higher rates.

The urban enclaves I have a sense of "who gives a shit". They stay in a city and live out their lives in a weird half-in-half-out state. And their kids slowly abandon them to the wider much better culture and economy that is all around them. They have all the vibrancy and threat of a museum.

Is this where we ignore how Urban areas tend to have a great amount of political control over a state as a whole? Not exactly something I'd describe as 'vibrancy and threat of a museum'.

I don't really care how you think those rural enclaves act. It was my experience with them combined with looking at history over the past hundred years or so that shifted me more toward an immigration hardliner - you import the culture, you get the problems, regardless of what environment they're in. Import good culture, you get good outcome. Import bad culture, you get bad outcomes. That simple.

There are enclaves out there where people don't assimilate. Usually it's in New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name].

Ah, the universal cop-out of "That's not true, except for the places it is, but I've decided they don't count." Speaking of Northern VA, I've seen unassimilated conclaves multiply exponentially over my 4 decades living there. Unassimilated Vietnamese pockets in Seven Corners, unassimilated South Korean pockets in Centreville, unassimilated Mexican pockets in Manassas, unassimilated Indians in Herndon. At certain point there is nothing to assimilate to anymore. In most of those towns native born whites are the minority. All of Northern VA in the 2020 census has a foreign born percentage of nearly 30%, far above what I believe would facilitate any sort of assimilation.

All I'm saying is, you done fucked up using my back yard as your example.

To me the question of assimilation is primarily about second and third generation immigrants. Obviously a bunch of people fresh off the boat are going to seem foreign, whether they're Europeans a hundred years ago or Asians today. To use a fictional example, Tony Soprano would count as unassimilated because despite being at least two generations removed from Italy, he does not consider himself American (he even uses the word madigan i.e. the dialectal Italian word for American, as a term of derision for WASPs), his speech is peppered with dozens of foreign expressions, and he is involved with a dysfunctional social practice from his ancestral homeland by being a mafia boss.

By contrast, the American-born children of Vietnamese from Seven Corners, Koreans from Centreville, or Indians from Herndon (all of whom I went to school with and know quite well) do not typically speak their heritage languages to anyone their own age or younger (i.e. they will die out within a generation), self-identify as American (hyphenated, of course), and are under the majority of circumstances culturally indistinguishable from their white neighbors (Indians insisting on traditional wedding ceremonies being the biggest exception that I can think of). Now, the culture they all share is cosmopolitan urban liberal culture, so anyone who has a problem with said culture will have a problem with them, but plenty of heritage Americans are part of it too.

In practice it's harder to maintain a distinct enclave in the suburbs compared to the city due to a lack of third places or walkable neighborhoods for people to congregate outside and do whatever activities are part of their culture. The ethnic neighborhoods in Queens (e.g. Flushing and Jackson Heights) are the most non-American feeling places in the country to me for this reason, and even there many immigrant children get out by testing into Stuyvesant or other selective high schools.

See my girl scouts comment.

I think there is a reason the "anti-immigration is racist" argument has lived on for so long. Ultimately it feels like no metric is ever good enough to convince anyone when there are just too many brown people by their approximation.

I went to George Mason, I've lived in the area for over a decade. My parents grew up in Northern Virginia (but neither stayed there). I grew up in a slightly rural area of Virginia. I only really know the English language. Aside from the area not being as white as where I grew up it still feels very American to me. I've been to India and multiple countries in Europe, so I know what a foreign country feels like. There is a discomfort in not knowing the language, in missing so many of the basic cultural understandings of everyone around you, and of not having the grounding feeling of knowing people around you. Its a feeling, I acknowledge you can feel differently about things. But if we are just gonna go on vibes, then I'm telling you where my vibe is at.

So its not just "your" backyard. Its at best "our" backyard. Though I don't claim any form of ownership over the area despite having lived here and had parents that have grown up here. That is one of my ongoing frustration with anti-immigration viewpoints and woke viewpoints. You don't solely own the common spaces. You don't own the right to determine who and what is acceptable there. So much of what they said is kind of status jockeying to be like "well I am the ultimate american, so i should get more say in how the common spaces look" or "i am the ultimate oppressed victim, so i should get more say in how the common spaces look".

So, you are committed to just skipping over all the unassimilated pockets I mentioned? After you claimed they only exist in "New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name]"? This isn't a dick measuring contest about who's more American, it's a "You've point of fact lied" problem. I get why you want to just ignore that to the same degree you wanted to handwave away unassimilated pockets in the first place. But I'm not going to let you.

There is a discomfort in not knowing the language, in missing so many of the basic cultural understandings of everyone around you, and of not having the grounding feeling of knowing people around you.

Yes, and that's exactly the feeling I get in the Eden Center at Seven Corners. In large sections of Manassas, and Centreville, and Herndon. It's bizarre having the place I grew up literally become a foreign country out from under me. I don't understand how you can look at those place, where they don't speak english, all the businesses aren't in english, nobody is dressing, speaking, or conducting themselves like Americans, and then say "Well they're selling thin mints so it all looks good to me. Nothing is as American as getting fucking fat."

Its a terrible immigration metaphor.

Obviously if you have prior disagreements with it, that is what it is. My argument is that him thinking so is a significant bit of evidence, and thats independent of how high the prior is.

Like when did "we" become a "we".

Presumably when you let him on (oops, turns out there are downsides to that). Or are you trying to argue that even more immigration is bad for him specifically but not you?

Our "lifeboat" is an entire freaking continent.

The country has limited space. It cannot absorb everyone who wants to come. That's why the lifeboat metaphor works in the first palace.

America is one of the least dense countries in the world. It is a net exporter of food. The US is about three times larger than India in size.

"The country has limited space" is only true in the trite and meaningless sense that it is not actually infinite. But it is certainly not running out of space or even getting all that tight.

The lifeboat metaphor is the ultimate "their is a fixed pie of resources" perspective. And if I believed that "fixed pie" story to be true I'd agree on immigration restrictions. But it's objectively not true and I'd have to lobotomize all the parts of my brain that know anything about economics to believe it.

I don't want strangers and foreigners in my space, regardless of how dense it's already populated. That space is the inheritance of my great grandchildren, and I'm not willing to give it away in a profligate manner, for any reason.

Go live in a treehouse in the woods and own all the land around you. Why should you get to dictate who is in public spaces? Strangers are a necessary part of civilization. People with foreign cultures, beliefs, and genes are a natural consequence of an expansive market that can provide nearly anything.

People with foreign cultures, beliefs, and genes are a natural consequence of an expansive market that can provide nearly anything.

China, Japan and South Korea say otherwise. You can't just throw out vague platitudes like that like they are iron laws. Countries exist that have figured out (or preserved the knowledge) how to take the goods off the market, and leave the people that made them.

All weak cultures that have barely survived the dominance and ascendancy of US culture. They have barely survived by keeping out all foreign borns, and then just copying the parts of our culture that they can. I don't want to emulate such weak cultures.

Bro, the US culture swallowed the contents of a double-barreled shotgun in front of my eyes. The "only" thing Japanese culture has to do to survive is increase their birthrates. I don't see American culture surviving without secession and/or massive social upheaval.

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It is a net exporter of food.

The US has been a net importer of food for a few years now (starting just before COVID)

"The country has limited space" is only true in the trite and meaningless sense that it is not actually infinite. But it is certainly not running out of space or even getting all that tight.

Most of that unused space is useless for living; the rest is off-limits for various reasons which aren't changing.

Then we need to sell off all the parks. And I don't need to tell you who does most of the farming.

The big areas where the resources are pretty fixed are university admission slots (especially prestige universities) and homes within commuting range of our most productive cities. I think it's fairfir Americans to view a society where they have more cheaper, crappier goods and can't afford a home or a shot at a good degree to be worse than one where goods are more expensive but they can all afford to live where they choose and their student loans are more manageable.

Those problems exist without immigration. They are in fact active policy choices on the part of cities and universities respectively.

Yes, they do, and so it's better to deal with those problems inside the family rather than inviting in a bunch of strangers to make it worse.

You haven't acknowledged that part of the reason for the problem is the last sixty-two years of immigration policy, either.

I ain't gotta "acknowledge" anything. And y'all ain't my family. Most Americans are immigrants and descendants of immigrants. And that was true 63 years ago as well.

If there is to be a cutoff point I select the civil war. Not because I want to say people coming afterwards are unwelcome, but because people coming afterwards shouldn't think of themselves as the "founding stock". If America is to be a blood and soil nation it is not for the whites it is for the English, their descendants, the descendants of the Dutch in New York, and the descendants of the enslaved.

You know, unless I had some independent reason to think theyre crazy, I would take that as strong evidence that its in my interest what theyre saying.

I've read that several times and I still don't quite understand what you mean. That the guy who wants to shut down the lifeboat is acting in your interests?

If Im on the lifeboat, and we pull up a guy and he says the lifeboats full, leave the others in the water, then its propably in my interest to do so. Obviously that also calls into question whether bringing him on was a good idea, but it might be too late on that front.

Perhaps. If the lifeboat starts sinking and we have to move onto another one, though, it would be a bad idea to let that guy go in front.

it might be too late on that front.

Careful when pushing people back into the water, lest the guy behind you decides that he would be safer yet were you too out of the boat?

No particular reason, just that this is potentially a different case and the otcome there not necessarily an argument for treating the swimmers a certain way.

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