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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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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

They would love when the price of consumer goods go up if their wages go up as well.

Well only the fruit pickers wage would go up. The mechanics wage would not, and the price of their food would.

If everyone's wage goes up equally you're just describing inflation.

It’s crucial to understand why this isn’t the case. The mechanic competes in wages with the fruit picker (in an economy with an absence of illegal labor), not directly but transitively, because the mechanic competes with somebody who competes with somebody who […] competes with the fruit-picker. Increasing opportunity for the lower class increases it for the lower-middle, which increases it for the middle. Everyone’s QoL and wages increase. Food prices increase, but wages increase higher than they for the lower and middle. It won’t increase wages for the upper white collar professionals, because there’s a strict barrier where they simply would never consider entering a trade or working as a chef even if wages in these places rose considerable, which is because of the class association. (And remember remittance payments: 66 billion yearly just for Mexico!)

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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)

7.77 million tons of rice production annually isn’t trivial and neither is 77,000 tons of green tea

7.77 million tons of rice production annually isn’t trivial

It's about 15% more than US rice production, and Japan's biggest crop by far. Meanwhile, the US with only roughly 3 times the population also produces 8.5 million tons of sorghum, 48 million tons of wheat, 117 million tons of soybeans (which Japan imports a good deal of), and 370 million tons of corn. Of course, these are all cereal grains and all subject to harvesting and processing with automation; Japan no longer has to rely on peasants with sickles and hand flails. That's why nobody talks about rice pickers but rather fruit pickers. Automated fruit harvesting, at least for first quality fruits, is something that hasn't been solved for many fruits.

Green tea is a little more like fruit, in that the top quality stuff is hand picked, but harvesting of lower quality stuff is automated. But 77,000 tons really is trivial.

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.

You’re missing the entire substance of the argument, which is that the reason the QoL of agriculture is too low for natives is because of the migrants. If you deport them all, ag needs workers, ag must increase QoL, it looks more like WOOFing which white people love doing.

If I could immediately hire foreign English-speakers as paralegals, importing them in and keeping them in cramp accommodations and ensure they are afraid of leaving the job because finding work as an illegal is tricky, the paralegal market in America would implode. There would be no American paralegals left. So the American paralegal cannot compete with the migrant worker driven paralegal industry.

The QoL of agricultural grunt workers has, in every society in history, been pretty bad. Yes, you can entice some college kids to do a bit of it over the summer for unlimited booze and sex, but I am very skeptical they'll do enough of it to replace migrants. 'Picking crops' is just a job that always inherently sucks.

The cost advantage of illegals is also not the only reason that illegals are preferred by lower blue collar employers; I don't know if you've met native white and black trash but they're both just awful. Drugs, dysfunctional relationships, poor communication and attendance, legal issues, poor conflict-management, unreliability, theft and dishonesty, laziness, etc are way worse among our native underclass- and illegals are themselves not necessarily role models with that stuff. Lots of them are essentially unemployable because that's who's left over in a society like the US where huge majorities of functional and capable people 'make it' out of having to do shitty unskilled labor for a living.

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).

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