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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:

Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."

That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.

DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.

Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.

  • -38

There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself. They are citizens; they have more in common with you if you are a wealthy white person; for evolutionary reasons, it is natural to have an interest in uplifting those that are similar to yourself; for reasons of national security, you do not want so many citizens who believe that the American project is not worth investing in; they may have a higher IQ than Hondurans; they may have different levels of compassion or a different taste in aesthetics which may be informed by genetics.

Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party

College-educated White males lean toward Trump. It’s just women who shifted a lot toward Harris.

Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor

This may have something to do with the millions of migrants brought in to undercut wages, the exact thing we’re talking about. No, you can’t ever compete with them, because —

  • Remittance payments mean that they can afford a higher quality life while temporarily living a lower quality life in America

  • They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will

  • They often live in illegal accommodations, requiring less funds, and these require a network that natives aren’t a part of

  • They live within a culture where the women expect to marry laborers

I’m also not sure if you’re agreeing with him that it would increase wages, and just disagree that this is important, or if you think it won’t increase wages.

They often live in illegal accommodations, requiring less funds, and these require a network that natives aren’t a part of

You, as a white American, can find these illegal accommodations really easily. Craigslist has some of them listed, but you can also just go to the back of a restaurant kitchen and ask.

Illegals are preferred to the native underclass partly because they cost less, but much more because they just cause less trouble, and the standard of living difference isn't the main driver of the cost difference- the native underclass uses their extra income over illegals for drugs, not better food or accommodations(and illegals probably make up for their lower hourly rate by working longer hours anyways).

Do you think that the Honduran or Mexican illegal tenant housing advertises their roommate openings in Craigslist, in English? No. This is absurd to believe. Especially not around farming operations.

The point was you can get significantly below market(and priced to match) housing really easily. You don't need to be plugged into the wetback network, and roustabouts are not known for their robust network building anyways. Go ask around at waffle house. Look on craigslist. The white trash underclass lives in very similar conditions, after all. Non underclass whites don't do this, but that's because they don't want to.

There's this motte conceit that you can't live like the other half. Yeah, you can, and pretty easily too.

So your answer to the question of how White Americans can compete with semi-slave illegal workers is

  • Go ask around a Waffle House

  • Look around on Craigslist for illegal housing

  • (Ignore remittance payments)

  • (Ignore cultural and early life influences involving manual labor, eg that some of these Hondurans have been doing it since 12)

  • (Ignore crucial cultural factors related to social wellbeing like finding a wife)

Middle class whites should not plan on doing crappy grunt work for a living. A certain amount of unfair labor practices is necessary to keep a society running and as far as I'm concerned a few Oaxacans and Hondurans are a win-win way to get that done. We don't need to import millions of welfare cases and deliveroo drivers but turning a blind eye to some construction and agriculture workers of questionable legality is better for everyone.

The underclass already lives a very similar lifestyle, just more degenerate. It would be great if they could be forced to do more work and less drugs, I just have little faith in their ability to do so(we're several generations past the point at which people who are willing to do work instead of drugs stop being poor in this country).

White non-underclass youths that want to make something of themselves usually do; they go from digging ditches for a plumber to assisting the plumber laying pipe to being a plumber themselves. I don't see the problem unless it's with 'there are Hispanics in the vicinity'.

The Middle Class already does crappy work for a living. I don’t think farming is grunt work — if I had a choice I would sooner enslave the financiers than the farmers. I would rather import Chinese and Indians to take the jobs of White financiers than the farmers, because that is truly innoble work. The Western Christian legacy is considering this work as innoble, as beneath human dignity. Even programming demeans humanity more than “picking fruit”. Look at how they write on Twitter. They are halfways to the singularity and I pray that their wishes come sooner and they become fully machine.

a few Oaxacans and Hondurans

Right, it’s obviously an incredibly larger amount than this which can easily make the White population dwindle to 5% by the end of the millenia.

better for everyone

Not at all. Actually, there’s a good argument to be made that deportations could increase all the wages of the lower middle class. But if we’re really basing things off of “better for everyone” we need to talk about waste among the .1% income level.

I don’t think farming is grunt work

It is, whether you think so or not, which is why historically when people got the chance they fled the farms for horrible factory jobs.

I don't see any reason it would be "innoble" or "beneath human dignity", but it's backbreaking.

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So your answer to the question of how White Americans can compete with semi-slave illegal workers is

Why in God's name would you want to?

As I keep saying, the conditions required to 'keep farms running so we can stock the shelves with a variety of produce' are not great, and first worlders will not do it without compulsion(or, I suppose, being deluded into halfway doing this for brief periods of time on partyfarms). Likewise lots of heavy construction labor etc.

Americans should mow their own lawns, watch their own children, etc. But the idea that we can replace illegal migrants and roustabouts with middle class whites is farcical. Manual laborers are by definition not middle class, at least when they're doing temporary grunt work.

Americans should mow their own lawns

Eh, f--- that, I've got hay fever.

Historical precedent suggests that the same voters flip flop every four years.

This is a bit of a quibble, but actually it’s more like voters come in and out of participation, but the numbers usually balance out in such a way so as to appear that the same voters switch every time. Longitudinally, the number of individual voters who regularly change their mind is pretty low. But yes, elections are close, so they can still matter, but overall they aren’t the kingmaker. What IS true is that these movements in and out of participation are still downstream from persuasion, and tend to jive with mind-changers. So the general idea still holds.

In 2020 to 2024, for instance, although the chart doesn’t show candidate breakdowns, you can see Figure 43 from this report that about half of voters are consistent but the other half is made up of about 3 even-ish groups: new entrants, dropouts, and midterm-skippers.

When talking about Biden, this summarization basically says that 2024 Democrats had both a turnout and persuasion problem, but turnout alone wouldn’t have reversed the loss (so functionally it is still persuasion, which is exactly how you want the elections to work)

EDIT: will further point out that reading the second link provides compelling evidence that the pro-Trump shift, 2020 to 2024, was driven more by men than women, although both groups shifted that direction. We're talking 10% and 2% changes, going by Pew numbers.

In the 2016 and 2020 elections, white non-evangelicals with college degrees and even white non-evangelicals without college degrees supported Biden by a wide margin

The arbitrary filtering of one of the largest religious groups is silly. The shift to D is mostly among women, not the men. If you’re like me, and think politics should be reserved for the male-brained, women shifting D after a media propaganda blitz that utilized emotional propaganda about victimhood is not at all persuasive in regards to any trend that matters.

less than 50% of Republicans are now in favor of decreasing immigration, down from 88% last year.

This question doesn’t tell us anything, because it is in regards to the “present level of immigration”, under Trump who has been (at least presenting himself as) deporting illegals. The average has no idea that the country plans to import so many Indians. The average voter has no idea about the statistics related to yearly immigration, like, at all. You’re asking them about vibes. Shame on Gallop here.

Off topic, but I kind of wonder how the racial estimate question might change if you gave people a slider that forces all the percentages to sum to 100

the U.S. is more linguistically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse than it has ever been.

I don't know about that. In the past there were entire states which mostly didn't speak English(Lousiana and New Mexico have both had governments that did not operate in English).

I think it really just turns on what you consider "diversity". Obviously and famously past Americans considered Germans and Irish and such as contextually diverse in all four of those senses, while today we would probably not say the same of their descendants. I'm sure you could take a stab at some rough numbers about what it might have been over time if you used diversity "in context" for contemporaries, but that would probably be pretty difficult and subjective. Still, I like the instinct here, because it does always annoy me when we hear the similar idea about "division" being the worst it's ever been when the country literally fought a civil war before.

Linguistic and religious diversity might be exceptions, though. This article has a few stats for language that implies it was higher even (or especially) at the Founding, although also worth a side-note that the voting percentages would have been different to some extent. In terms of religious diversity that's also tricky - how do you count "religiously unaffiliated" and its various flavors? I don't really think a fair historical comparison is possible, and I guess you could try, but I won't.

There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself

I never said it was. I think uplifting the in-group by getting them jobs sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain is pathetic.

They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will

The fundamental difference between me and you is that I like white people more, which extends to liking first-world societies that white people built. I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.

  • -13

I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.

There are many grounds on which a person can compete. "I'm cheaper because I ignore all employment, construction and safety laws and regulations" is certainly a niche, but it's not a given that it's a niche we ought to tolerate.

Its really hard to believe that you or anyone would actually hold this position.

if you are as racist as you claim, then surely you would prefer to live in a place where all jobs were done by white people, if only because it would mean that you would only have to interact with white people. But instead your position is that for abstract reasons, it offends you to allow white people to do manual labor, so its better to import brown people to do it, even though it means that you and your friends and family have to interact with brown people all the time? And you now risk brown people becoming a meaningful voting block in your society that can never be expunged. Like it would be one thing if you said you were in favor of the migrant work laws used by UAE and not america, or you like rhodesia, but your position doesn't seem to be divided like that. Those of us who live in the modern west, live in the modern west. Is you position based on a fictional alternate reality?

Your position seems really counterintuitive. I strongly suspect you are lying because your stated beliefs and policies are so wildly out of sync with each other - when taking into account the real world as it exists now.

if you are as racist as you claim, then surely you would prefer to live in a place where all jobs were done by white people, if only because it would mean that you would only have to interact with white people. But instead your position is that for abstract reasons, it offends you to allow white people to do manual labor, so its better to import brown people to do it, even though it means that you and your friends and family have to interact with brown people all the time?

Without anti-discrimination law people would be able to choose whether or how much they want to interact with brown people.

And you now risk brown people becoming a meaningful voting block in your society that can never be expunged.

A reasonable concern. But it's worth looking at the impact on America so far. In Florida and Texas, the majority of Hispanics voted for Trump. Hispanics nationally still voted slightly more often for Democrats, but if you account for the fact that Hispanics are more likely to support centrist than far-left Dems, (just look at the melanin content of a pride rally or a DSA meeting) it doesn't seem like they're moving America to the left at all.

I think uplifting the in-group by getting them jobs sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain is pathetic.

Why? It works incredibly well for China, who has seen consistent gains in QoL. It worked well throughout the history of the West. Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf. Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity. In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history. Not for the slaves, of course, but for the non-enslaved.

I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.

Well you ignored all of my points regarding this. If I also ignored all of the points I would agree with you.

Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity

Brother if this is your imagination of piecework farm labor you should go on YouTube and see what it's like

If it were viable to employ illegal workers as baristas, you would be shocked at how horrible the QoL for baristas is too. Have you seen how bad the QoL is for soldiers? It’s because they don’t have a choice!

Wow, horrible, picking berries. They are performing literally the same physical movements that a grocery stocker performs, except the objects are lighter, they aren’t breathing in microplastics all day, the ground beneath them isn’t concrete, they don’t hear horrible pop music 24/7… how could anyone do this?

Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf.

Then buy yourself a sewing machine. We shouldn't make national policy choices based on psychological theories like that.

In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history.

We should make national policy decisions based on the projected wellbeing of citizens. That would include the psychological theories of Csikszentmihalyi, which shows that certain occupational activities are more conducive to happiness.

I'm going to push back on this- no doubt you can get some heiresses to work on the partyfarm, but agricultural work is sufficiently terrible that it requires non-free or at least desperate labor to get done in sufficient quantities. Guatemalans, convicts, helots, the corvee- this is who's always done heavy farm work.

Now operating machines is fun and sexy and high status, so mechanization changes that, but some farming will probably never be mechanized. The alternative to strawberry pickers from Chiapas is either a) enslaved strawberry pickers[in America, these would probably be prisoners] or b) not having strawberries. Now migrant labor doesn't have to change the demographics of the country- we could send them back to Honduras or Oaxaca or wherever to enjoy their pay in a much lower cost of living locale when the season is over- but let's be real here, America isn't going to do the smart thing.

we could send them back to Honduras or Oaxaca or wherever to enjoy their pay in a much lower cost of living locale when the season is over

We make up for it by importing infinitely Indian """students""" but in Canada we actually do a great job at this with migrant harvest workers

They're actually super dialled, farmers will compete to hire back the most productive squads of Ecuadorian peach harvesters, etc. They basically noodle around NA/SA following the various harvest seasons.

requires non-free or at least desperate labor to get done in sufficient quantities

What is your excuse for why China is able to do it while having a one standard deviation higher median IQ over America? Even Japan does not utilize as many foreign laborers as America.

China has many people who are far more desperate than America for similar reasons to Mexico(it's a middle income country with high income inequality), and also doesn't have full freedom of movement. People who have the option to be laborers in cities will prefer that to being agricultural laborers.

Then consider Japan, which only employs 50k migrants in its agricultural and forestry sector.

People who have the option to be laborers in cities will prefer that to being agricultural laborers

And if there is an absence of agricultural workers, the wages for agriculture go up, meaning the conditions become as desirable as WWOOFing, meaning people return to work in agriculture.

the wages for agriculture go up

Americans famously love when the price of consumer goods go up

Also Japan imports 60% of its calories

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What is your excuse for why China is able to do it while having a one standard deviation higher median IQ over America?

They likely don't; all those rural laborers don't show up in the IQ stats because they don't take the tests.

And the Japanese? How about the Japanese in the 80s?

Japan imports a massive amount of food. This would be pretty dumb for the US to do, considering the massive amount of farmland we have.

(I believe the US is a net food importer by dollars, but not by calories)

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They do it for years at a time. It’s called WWOOFing. Lots of the scions of high human capital humans do it.

Perhaps you find it hard to believe because, like the person above, you can’t imagine that QoL and wages for farmwork will increase if the semi-slave laborers are deported. When conditions improve, more people will be willing to do it, and more places will look like WWOOFing.

My comment on WWOOF was made to argue that White people — even some of the pristine “human capital” that sociopaths autists certain people value over others — are willing to do genuinely difficult farming for long hours when the social conditions are right. One WWOOFer I know is the son of two high-powered lawyers. I know someone who runs a place and she’s a very intelligent pianist. They would never in a million years do it if they were only around Hondurans who barely spoke English, and if there were zero breaks and harsh foremen watching them. Just like, in the South, not many White people were willing to “compete” with slaves in agricultural work.

Re 1: WWOOF is usually done for many months at a time, probably no more than a year at a time, but you have WWOOFers who do it for 5+ years along different locations as a way to travel for free. Why wouldn’t agricultural work look more like WWOOFing in the absence of a semi-slave class? Do the Chinese working in agriculture today have the same conditions as 1950? Of course not, because wages and benefits have increased. Really we’re just asking, “how badly can we get away with reducing QoL for the poorest using semi-slave labor” which is the wrong question to ask in the face of Jeff Bezoses.

Re 4: I know one place that sells lots of their products at a local market. I know another which is a kind of co-op farm where local people “invest” in a portion of the crops. I am probably describing this poorly.

I am not saying that WWOOFing is the future, I am saying that agricultural work will look more like WWOOFing in the absence of semi slave labor.

Yes, you can charm white liberal arts major women into doing farming for a few months at a time, and there will always be guys showing up to agglomerations of naive and easy women. But if hippie communes were able to compete with migrant worker driven industrial agriculture they'd be doing it; there's certainly enough market for organic goods.

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Illegal immigrant jobs have high turnover, I think, not withstanding the seasonality of the work. Someone doesn’t usually work in an Amazon warehouse for more than 2/3 months and I’ve talked to logistics companies who said that it’s difficult to get drivers to stick around (immigration status unknown).

So you want a serf/slave class of the "inferior" brown people because such jobs are below the dignity of the "superior" white people (never mind that white people all over the world used to, and still do, such jobs). We needn't be afraid that the browns will do anything, because we should (as the superiors) ensure they have no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour until robots can do the job and hence they will be debarred from polluting our culture due to not being able to influence it, and we shouldn't encourage white people to pick up the slack by doing these low-class jobs because such jobs are only fit for low-class people and we don't want low-class white trash, that reflects poorly on our superiority.

All white people will be middle-middle to upper-middle to upper-class, doing high-status jobs for Elite Human Capital because we are so much better, and all the shitty (literally) jobs will be done by the inferior brown people until the AI-powered robots take over.

Am I right? Because I'm blessed if I can understand in any other way the points you are darkly hinting at.

So you want a serf/slave class of the "inferior" brown people because such jobs are below the dignity of the "superior" white people (never mind that white people all over the world used to, and still do, such jobs). We needn't be afraid that the browns will do anything, because we should (as the superiors) ensure they have no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour until robots can do the job and hence they will be debarred from polluting our culture due to not being able to influence it, and we shouldn't encourage white people to pick up the slack by doing these low-class jobs because such jobs are only fit for low-class people and we don't want low-class white trash, that reflects poorly on our superiority.

I don't agree with "no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour." All their negative rights should be respected, though not "rights" to collect welfare or anything like that. The issue is not specifically racial. I don't think anyone should aspire to those kinds of occupations, nor romanticize or fetishize them.

I don't think anyone should aspire to those kinds of occupations, nor romanticize or fetishize them.

And yet the work has to be done, and we don't yet have the robots to do it. All the unglamorous necessary toil to support civilisation.

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