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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I'm a doomer on the U.S., and I want to know what you guys think, in general, will be the trend for the next decade or further on. Here's my theory for how all this ends:

  • Politically, conflict theory has totally won. Extremists from both parties keep trying to outdo each other. This can lead to outright civil war or government breakdown down the line. Democracies all around the globe host more and more unhappy populations that, no matter which politicians they vote in, never seem to get what they want, leading them to vote in more and more strange and radical candidates.
  • Government spending will never recede. Too many groups need to stay satisfied with their welfare, otherwise the party that cuts them will never win an election again. This will lead to an eventual collapse, someday, with more and more economic pain as time goes on and as less productive people exist to support the invalids and growing number of leeches.
  • Dating sucks and gender relations are likely going to get worse as the social media experiment continues, to South Korea levels. It can only get worse from here.
  • As someone mentioned downthread, I could easily see status becoming harder and harder to get, as the players in the game optimize towards the most awful way to live: constant striving in every arena. Anyone left playing the game is a tiger mom. This is the one I'm least sure about, but it could change rapidly as economic circumstances shift.
  • I have no idea if the country will fail slow or fast, but it will likely decline in the next decade by a noticeable amount.

My friend is more of an optimist. Here's his theory on the first one:

  • Eventually, one party is going to realize their extremists never win races. They elect a moderate. Things normalize, politically.

Unfortunately, I didn't quiz him on all the rest of it. But now, somehow, it is making me wonder about the outlook of most of the Mottizens. I certainly see the doomer take on things pretty often.

I see a factoid sometimes that says conservatives are happier with their lives than liberals. Maybe that's a factor of rural living, maybe that's a factor of less thinking about serious issues, and less reading. I am pretty sure that conservatives on this site, on average, do not live in rural areas and, on average, think a lot more about serious issues, and read more. So maybe some bad, anecdotal science testing on The Motte is in order.

Are you a doomer, or a "bloomer"? What are some factors that lead you to your conclusion that the country is trending downwards or upwards? Please explain yourself, and please fight it out with everyone who thinks you're wrong.

Not American, and I won't speak to America.

As for Germany though, and the world in general, I'm a "go down swinging"-Doomer. My country is doomed by terminal cultural decline, political idiocy, economic sclerosis, technological ignorance, social atomization and demographic freefall. We're big enough and wealthy enough to muddle on for a long while yet, but there seems to be no reason to expect a reversal of trends.

As for the world in general, I strongly suspect that the age of humanity as we knew it is slowly drawing to a close.

And I don't necessarily mean AI, although that will of ocurse be a factor. LLMs are powerful enough to replace humans in certain niches, sure, but AI as a whole still has a way to go before before it can outcompete us in general. It will, though. Sooner or later. Whether the protagonists of tomorrow's history will be AIs untethered from discrete physical bodies, or robots, or human bodies with AIs living in their heads, who knows. But in the long enough run, human bodies will just be a waste of resources. A little closer to now, we'll see more and more niches taken over by machines and AIs. At first the steam engines came for the hammering, but I was not a John Henry, so I didn't speak up. Then the robot arms came for the assembly lines, but I wasn't a stereotypical blue-collar worker so I didn't speak up. Then the LLMs came for the professional bullshitters, but they still have enough regulations in place to keep their sinecures for a while yet. One day they'll come for the last of us. Maybe some few humans will be rich and powerful even then, commanding legions of AIs and whatever human serfs please them. But one day the universe will take a good look at "humanity", notice that the humans don't actually have a role to play in there, and simplify the equation by removing us. Transhumanism to the rescue, some say - empower humans through technology to outcompete inhuman AIs. But why keep the human in there, I ask? What do we have to offer?

And alright, let's skip the AI topic. Let's pretend they don't exist. Science-fiction does it all the time. Recognizably human protagonists, personally choosing to do things, leading recognizably human lives in which they choose what to do with their lives, whom to associate with, experiment with different lifestyles, engage in adventure and romance, excel in their chosen fields, found families, believe in higher concepts, live with purpose, just like their ancesorts did five thousand years ago, true human lives for true humans.

As if.

Aside: Information technology is rotting our brains. Maybe we'll develop countermeasures (Totalitarian regulation? Social engineering? Neurological modification?) and keep the digital crack in check. If not, then natural selection will cull the susceptible. Alright, problem solved either way. This one was easy. Now let's get to the meat.

Human population continues to grow. There's a lot of us. We're not living in villages and small communities anymore (well I do, but let's not pretend that this is the norm). The growth of states seems to have been checked for the time being by the current international order, but sooner or later there will be pressure to unify further - and if that cannot happen, then states will slowly be superseded by some new order that does not respect borders as they are. Many claim that is is already happening, but in my view it's a slow process. Bigger polities with disproportionately bigger populations, atomized and globalized, welcome to the cyberpunk future in which human lives are individually just not very valuable. Will this future be the turbo-capitalist dystopia in which humans are simply commodities, flitting about from place to place, working 80-hour weeks just to keep from drowning in debt, completely dehumanized and disassociated from each other by a lack of time and the fluidity of the labor market and enjoying a standard of living that's just barely above being a rat in a box, on a good day? Or will it be a hyperregulated totalitarian nightmare in which you are born and bred and raised for the task that society requires of you, you work 80 hours a week because any less and you're an asocial parasite, you're dehumanized and disassociated from other humans because of a lack of time and the rigidity of centrally planned social organization, and you enjoy a standard of living that's just barely above being a rat in a box, on a good day? At least humans are still around, and not governed by AI overlords - but rather by market dynamics or some buerocracy. Either way, it's an inhuman superorganism that humans are little more than cells of. We will live like this. We will breed and engineer and select and adapt ourselves to live like this. At present we are halfway between the feral hogs frolicking in the woods that we were and the domesticated pigs born and butchered in an assembly line that we are destined to be. Pray that the future does not replaces us with synthetic meat.

Human life will change. It will either change by becoming completely obsolete, or will (either as a transitional period before total obsolescence or as a terminal state) change by becoming increasingly optimized towards producing value while demanding a minimum of resources. If you think otherwise, please tell me why. Historically we've gone the other way, right? Humans are more free, more individually wealthy and comfortable than ever. Why should the future be the opposite? Why in the world should we have reached peak human flourishing already?

Because in my view, either information technology or social technology are becoming ever-more suitable for the instrumentalization of humans by superorganisms, be they markets or buerocracies or AIs. Historically human agency was a key component in human value, but as we coalesce into and are subsumed by larger entities, individual human capabilities become increasingly inadequate to navigate the world. I'm no scientist, no futurist, nor even very smart like many mottizens. I can't do a good job of pinpointing why I think this. Please disagree with me. Tell me I'm wrong.

Anyways, what can a reasonable approximation of a real human being like myself do when the future looks like that? Becoming one of the beautiful elite who rules over the unwashed commoditized masses seems exceedingly unlikely. Becoming a transhuman god like some here (you know who you are) expect to be seems laughably unlikely because, as said, that god doesn't need a human component. When the future looks like a nightmare either way, the best I can do to meet it is to just carry on and say bring it. We'll cross those bridges when we get there. It's not like any ending other than death and oblivion were ever in the books, for anyone, be they man or machine or godlike superorganism or the universe itself. Consolation prize: In the end, we're all equally gone.

I would consider myself heavily blackpilled, but no, not remotely a doomer. Mostly because personally I still get to enjoy life. I had to scale my ambitions back heavily and lower my standards, but I've been able to get small carveouts of joy.

There's something I experience as true in my own professional life; people will do the right thing, after first exhausting literally every other possible option. That things suck is not evidence of failure, it is evidence of how far we have left to fall. We suck so much because we can get away with it.

There are significant parts of the human experience denied to me, but for most of human history they were denied to most people as well, so my experience is not hugely different. Of all the tragedies I feel most fiercely is our inability to write fiction for the mass audience (and to have it actually read and understood) that isn't atrocious. I am willing to sleep on park benches and eat the bugs if we would just produce better fiction.

I would consider myself heavily blackpilled, but no, not remotely a doomer. Mostly because personally I still get to enjoy life. I had to scale my ambitions back heavily and lower my standards, but I've been able to get small carveouts of joy.

Nice bit of humblebragging there. (Some of us are not so fortunate.)

It just comes down to appreciating the small things.

I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I've had the pleasure to observe some of the senior programmers at work who are deeply in the hole and have hundreds of dollars worth of specialized coffee equipment at the office just for the sake of getting a slightly better cup.

This strikes me as insanity, but over time I've learned to appreciate both the ritual that they go through and also the massive chain of events that led to that equipment being developed, built, procured, the coffee being sourced, grown, packaged - all of it.

Working in logistics has given me a deep appreciation for how the supply chain works at all, given how much of a mess it frequently is. All for the sake of delivering these small miracles we don't even think about.

I'm not a doomer by nature and I'm optimistic that America will still be a very good place to live in the medium term. The competition is very thin. Europe is busy ramping up footgun production; Israel is, uh, let's move on; the rest of the Anglosphere is content to give up all notions of freedom and liberty; East Asia is dying countries plus China; perhaps a small country like Switzerland is the only thing that can compete.

But at the same time as I get older I feel less confident that all the problems that, as a youth, I thought would be resolved will ever get resolved. The housing market is screwed. The education system is screwed. Unscrewing these is basically impossible because, as they say, "you'd make a lot of sick people very unhappy." There's too many entrenched interests, there's too many comfortable people whose ongoing comfort depend on nothing ever happening. You'd need a true 'orrible cunt who doesn't care about making friends who manages to get power to do something about this.

Fundamentally, I view these things as a conflict between dynamism and stasis. Outside of a few fields, I don't see dynamism returning to America in the medium term. Over the longer term, if we manage to beat back stasis without a true catastrophe, I think that will be enough for me and my children.

Israel is, uh, let's move on

They seem to have now declared war on the terrorist menace that is the Catholic Church by yet another "oopsies! did we bomb that? sorry, just a mistake!"

Honestly, the amount of "oopsies, we didn't mean it!" bombings the Israeli armed forces have been doing recently, they're not really a good advertisement for them being a developed First World secular nation, now are they? Though you have to admire their cursed by luck ability to hit the only Catholic church in Gaza by complete accident, didn't mean it, had no idea it was there. Poor guys, they must just have such terrible equipment, clearly they need billions of military aid to get modern range sights so things like this won't happen again!

(Before the mods slap me around: yes, I am being heavily sarcastic in order not to be heavily enraged and start calling no-no names. That being said, let the beatings commence!).

It seems like the obvious way to square this circle is that Israeli forces are being generally indiscriminate in Gaza and the officer who ordered a potshot at Holy Family Parish did not realize this was a location to be treated with kid gloves(which it does). The Israeli government did not want to destroy the church or they would have presumably done it via artillery fire that 'missed'. They also let cardinal Pizzaballa visit and call more attention to the place.

Honestly, the amount of "oopsies, we didn't mean it!" bombings the Israeli armed forces have been doing recently,

... in the same breath as bragging about the precision of the bombing of Iran, it might be worth adding...

if we manage to beat back stasis without a true catastrophe, I think that will be enough for me and my children.

That's a very big "if." Far, far, far more likely we don't. And what then?

what then?

Ho, where is my rifle?

Ho, where is my saber?

In an even field, wide and open,

Beyond the field, a green forest.

In the forest, a tall tree,

Tall and mighty-trunked.

On the tree, a bird—a nightingale,

The little bird sings, it says:

"Who has a beloved so fair,

Let them love, let them cherish,

For turbulent years are coming,

Lest only regret remains."

Speak plainly; I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, or what argument you're trying to make. (And how is simply copy-pasting a quote not "low-effort" at that?)

If I may be less serious and delve into some Cabalistic insanity, and site Psalm 89: "Thou has a mighty arm, strong is thy hand, and high is thy right hand."

So, first, go read Unsong so as to avoid spoilers.

So there's this wordplay that equates Neal Armstrong to the right hand of God. After all, what strong arm has been higher than the Moon? But I'd take it a step further, and go back to the example of raising one's right hand high: when Israel was attacked in the wilderness, and Moses controlled the outcome of the battle by the raising of his hands. Notably, he was old and tired and the battle lasted for a while, so assistants had to prop up his right arm to keep his right hand high and win the day.

People like to point to the early 1970s as the beginning of the decline of the West. Not coincidentally, that overlaps the Apollo program. If we allow that Neal Armstrong represents the right hand of God being raised high, and Apollo is the climax of human achievement (that and eradicating smallpox, around the same time), then it's not so odd that the decline follows Armstrong's return to Earth. Like Moses, the strong arm tired and fell, and so too the tide began to turn against its people. But unlike Moses, we didn't have anyone prop up his right arm to win the battle.

So to answer the question: we're doomed unless we go back to the Moon. And the Artimas program is not encouraging.

Honestly I don't think domestic life is going to be too awful. The real shock for the US is going to be the precipitous decline in US foreign policy influence. At some point this century, Americans are going to wake up to some kind of rude and jarring awakening to how (relative to the past) impotent the influence has become.

I think domestic life will be bad, in the sense that people will grow more atomized, disconnected, and lonely, while housing and health costs will continue to absorb more and more of people’s wealth, and the division between the haves and the have-nots grows even more intense.

I think both the left and the right realize this is our destiny, it just depends on how you frame it which side starts cheering and which side starts going, “well, actually…”

Prediction- the GOP retains and increases its dominance at the national level due to a confluence of factors, some structural-constitutional and some by being blessed with insane enemies. Their performance in government is consistently lackluster; the solution to the exploding debt continues to be inflation and lying, the ideologues migrate to state level politics and the national US government becomes increasingly corrupt due to one party dominance. The long term trend in by-group TFR continues where the red tribe takes, and holds long term, status as the highest-TFR major group. US population peaks in the 2040's, and social security's decline in real dollar amounts becomes unfixable. This leads to a real estate price decline as seniors tap into their sources of wealth.

The labor market remains strong for blue collar workers but experiences ups and downs, and slow wage growth, for white collar workers. The population concentrates in a relatively smaller number of cities; for status seekers, this timeline sucks. For second tier cities, it's awesome.

Russian (or maybe Irish) proverb: nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.

Also, do you think any country is doing better? Which?

We're always going to have problems. Problems can be solved though, and the ones that don't get solved are maybe not as bad as in our imagination.

One example: the debt problem is bad but it's still decades out before it becomes catastrophic, and it could still be ameliorated or turned into a soft default (e.g. a few bouts of massive inflation) in the meantime. Also if we default on our debt everyone else is also feeling serious pain as well.

I believe we're in the twilight years of a meritocratic age, where it's fairly easy to build wealth and status now, but you need to be a highly intelligent and enterprising person to make it happen (like someone in a picaresque), and this gets slightly harder each year.

For instance, I'm developing a game, and the standards for indie games over the past decade have ballooned to such a wild degree that we're now selecting for elite members of the population who can learn and do anything. If 8-10 years ago you could succeed off a fun gameplay loop alone, in 2025 it now takes a unique art style, a healthy and active social media presence, and a fun+unique gameplay loop at minimum. You may counter that I'm describing the mega-hits, but the market is so risky that if you're not aiming for a mega-hit, you're rolling the dice on a flop. Gamers have criticized the industry for years for letting AA games die, but they died at the hands of the consumer. You are essentially telling creators to spend years on a product that is "kinda good" and gamble between a moderate success and a total flop, when aiming for a mega-hit is more like gambling between moderate success and incredible success (with a smaller chance of flop). Hitting the "gamble" button for a string of moderate successes is just unreasonable, when for both small and large developers one flop can spell catastrophe. So the norm that the industry has reached is, "let's gamble for a mega hit each time because just one will sustain us for years". Square Enix is one company that does this now, with XIV profits bankrolling their single-player games -- many of which aspire to be mega-hits and fail.

In this environment, the naturally gifted Miyamotos and Sakaguchis and Carmacks of today will still rise to the fore, but increasingly, they stand alone. And I can't feel positively about that. Aristocracy is predicated on the idea that if you simply gather all these gifted people together, they'll all cooperate and do incredible things. But I feel like that's bullshit, and innovation is drying up all across society.

For instance, I'm developing a game, and the standards for indie games over the past decade have ballooned to such a wild degree that we're now selecting for elite members of the population who can learn and do anything. If 8-10 years ago you could succeed off a fun gameplay loop alone, in 2025 it now takes a unique art style, a healthy and active social media presence, and a fun+unique gameplay loop at minimum. You may counter that I'm describing the mega-hits, but the market is so risky that if you're not aiming for a mega-hit, you're rolling the dice on a flop. Gamers have criticized the industry for years for letting AA games die, but they died at the hands of the consumer.

The real problem with all of this is that our best and brightest are competing to make video games and other pieces of entertainment which are, let's be real, mostly meaningless. Not all games can be Expedition 33.

No offense meant, but ideally these gifted people would be going into government and industry, not spending all their time on video games.

I wish they made video games that leverage all that engagement and addiction to better the consumer. Teach them useful skills, like the video gaming advocates always claimed games could! If you can make them stare at a screen for hours on end, at least make them come out of it improved rather than impoverished!

I wish. I wish.

At risk of coping, I would actually contend that video games do in fact teach useful skills, just not all games do, and the skills are very narrowly applicable. MMOs are the obvious outlier here, since the social aspect plays a large part, and e.g organizing raids is quite literally management work even if low-ish-stakes (and even then people certainly get mad just like IRL), my Classic WoW-playing friends regale me with tales of literal Excel spreadsheets for loot distribution.

On another note, autism simulators like Factorio or Path of Exile are very good at teaching soulless optimization systematic thinking, "seeing through" the immediate picture and user-facing things in general to the complex tangle of underlying systems beneath, which I think is a generally useful skill in life, besides a part of my literal job description right now as a mid-tier IT monkey. I'm plenty stupid for a nerd and definitely starting to feel the IQ gate required to advance further in the field, so I wouldn't say I'm the kind of gifted person who would naturally grok such things either, my interests absolutely made a tangible difference. This is definitely not the best course my life could've taken, but it's certainly far from the worst, even just mitigating the NEET attractor and throwing myself into wageslavery already averted a lot of the worse outcomes even if I'm not always happy about it.

(Tangential and somewhat edgy but my pet theory is the "systematic thinking" part is largely why gamers are so infamously Based - as "seeing through" visual/verbal veneers to the core beneath becomes ingrained and reflexive, you start to second-guess your lying eyes and Nootice an awful lot. Unfortunately the skill at keeping your Nooticing to yourself is purchased separately.)

mitigating the NEET attractor

What does this mean?

Avoiding the tendency of the hobby to suck you in and make you more and more devoted to the game at the expense of work or social life.

It's not so easy. You can't actually gamify boring things to make them fun. You can make kind-of-fun things funner, fun things very fun, etc. That's why most games are themed around things humans already find enjoyable and biologically rewarding: exploring, destroying stuff, killing people, operating machinery. And gamification works best on things like running or weightlifting.

Yeah, I know. I'm fully aware of it being wishful thinking.

I just really, really hope that "we" (humanity?) find a way to save ourselves from wireheading ourselves to death. It's just such a profoundly unaesthetic way of going out. But then again, I guess natural selection will handle it.

No offense meant, but ideally these gifted people would be going into government and industry, not spending all their time on video games.

You can meaningfully start working on a video game even if you're completely disconnected from any sort of career track or network, and can still produce something that many strangers will happily interact with if it's successful. Government is a complete nonstarter for any sort of solo work, and unless you're up for full-stack entrepreneurship on your lonesome, so is industry. Interesting work at unsolved problems also isn't exactly at the bottom of the org chart, so you'd need to maneuver some sort of illegible career-entrepreneurship maze with bottomless will to political power to get anywhere where you might get a chance to have meaningful impact anything. I don't see that many of the sorts of people who have a mindset of being good indie video game programmers wanting to get into that or thinking they would succeed at it. Sixty years ago, "try to join Bell Labs" would have been a clear path for someone who can do clever stuff but isn't terrible interested in constantly spending most of their effort in career advancement, but stable, slack-providing organizations like that are hard to keep around.

Absolutely! I could've been more clear - I don't blame game devs individually at all! I think this issue is a broader reflection of our cultural values, what we assign status to, and how difficult we make it for people to actually change things as opposed to just work as cogs in a giant system.

I hope we are able to renew some of our cultural institutions, but we'll likely need some clearing of the deadwood first.

I wish our best and brightest were competing to make video games. They're all at FAANG serving ads and optimizing our attention.

monkey paw curls

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For the most part, yeah I agree. It's a symptom of the decline.

Intellectually I can't argue against doom, but I have faith in a special Providence that protects fools, children, and the United States of America.

I do think America's gender wars will get worse before they get better, but keep in mind that much of South Korea's gender dysfunction is due to sex-selective abortion two decades ago.

I also think the truth is generally to be found in the middle. 25 million deportations is the thoughtful man's solution.

Actually, the other side of the issue is to grow America to 1 billion people, so allowing in merely another 300M people would be the centrist approach.

And make the camps livable but not comfortable. Like permanent fat camp. Honestly the best immigration strategy was Ali Gs strategy: only young hot women, no men EVER. I would also advocate for obligate LGB-especially T maximalism and have every declared MTF migrant get the chop. Yay feminism!

4m per year? or 4m total between 2025 and the end of 2028. I wonder sometimes what the actual realistic ceiling is on deportations. There are only so many ICE members, courts etc to process them. Though the budget for such was recently increased, it takes time to hire and train and build institutional capacity in any organization. I would expect a ramp in capacity over time; 2028 is likely to have more than the prior years. I read a semi-convincing argument that at current capacity, assuming the political will remains strong, we could maybe do 1m a year. Definitions and motivated statistical analysis also confound efforts to accurately capture such figures.

This is why the drum needs to be beaten over and over again that e-verify and ruinous fines for companies that employ illegal immigrants is the only way the problem will be solved. Trying to forcibly deport people while giving them a wonderful economic situation is a fool's gambit.

4 million deportations by the end of 2028

I have no interest in a bet of any size, just curious about the details. Do voluntary self-removals also count? I assume all removals have to be documented, not vague estimates like most immigration stats are?

Meh. I think that everyone likes feeling "sensible". That doesn't mean much, if everyone does feel like they're sensible. Being a centrist doesn't make you more sensible. It just makes you more palatable to more people. It also lets you get away with not actually giving your own viewpoint on what will happen, I guess. Comfortably distanced forum poster, you did a bad job responding to my post!

Aren't

people think that if we don't deport 50 million brown people the country is doomed

and

people think we're sliding into fascism and non-white people are going to be put in camps soon

the same people, if they think both are a good thing?

I have found I’m a blackpilled doomer in many ways. I have Noticed that I am always quick to be pessimistic and assume the worst, even though i am frequently wrong. I think im just a generally more anxious person though, and am probably an odd conservative sample

Conservative, think I'm much happier with my life, but not because of any kind of optimism towards our political future. I place about a 20% probability on a default and/or civil war in the next 20 years, but Christ is King so who cares? I'm American though so no thoughts of leaving. I'll die with this ship singing a song of praise that I was born on this land.

(Conservative happiness may not be dependent on optimism about material prospects.)

I place about a 20% probability on a default and/or civil war in the next 20 years, but Christ is King so who cares?

My mother and I were driving on the highway last night and talking about how the world seems to be going crazy, and half of young people aren’t even vaguely interested in family formation, and no one seems connected to any one any more.

And then the rain cleared and we saw a double rainbow, and she quoted from Genesis: “I have set my bow in the sky.” She continued, “We were just talking about how the world feels crazy, but God’s in control.”

Not American myself and often I find myself thinking 'Americans should try living with real incomes actually declining for a few years before doomposting online.' Despite many problems, the US has been able to sustain productivity growth where Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia have failed. Productivity is everything in the long run. You can buy or build your way out of just about any problem.

See the chart here. All the rich countries have been self-sabotaging much worse than the US: https://x.com/adam_tooze/status/1945588810898620786

But also there's a certain level of dopeyness in US leadership: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers

Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.

But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found. Some are former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work.

The other democracies also are slack to a certain extent, often a greater level, there's malaise and pointless bungling. But this still seems pretty bad. How do you plan on beating (or even deterring) China, a vastly larger country with enormous depths of talent and ludicrous levels of industrialization? You have to fight smart, you have to be wise and judicious.

"We're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we really can't tell."

US govt doesn't seem that smart. Plenty of smart people in America but perhaps not enough and surely not enough in the right places. There is or perhaps was an entire Discourse about the need to keep the all-important AI weights secret from Chinese spies. The concern was that private companies like OpenAI or Google were nowhere near the level of cybersecurity needed to combat state actors, they needed urgent government assistance and targeted industrial policy to support them. But this idea assumes the US is capable of keeping secrets, or of maintaining a major lead in AI, or actually implementing good plans correctly. But this 'doing things correctly' skill just doesn't seem to be there - military procurement, infrastructure buildout, fighting drugs, countering crime, tariffs, industrial policy...

I expect a society that has a number of educators who endorse pedagogy that prioritizes niceties over competence will generate less competent individuals. Although, I'm not sure that Americans at large ever did value competence much.

As for the government, the USG didn't seem that smart during the Cold War either. There was the government that allowed an intelligence agency to believe a 1000 strong militia could successfully execute regime change in Cuba with an amphibious landing. Sure, the CIA was a silly place filled with wacky ideas and incompetence. The very serious people -- the ones who didn't think the Bay of Pigs would work -- decided it was all well and good. They could just as easily deny involvement with a carrier task force offshore.

The USG has been exposed as inept in counter-espionage for century. Does this plane look familiar, or maybe I meant this one? US intelligence agencies and Federal law enforcement were repeatedly compromised at high levels right up to the end of the Cold War. Despite the fact Soviet espionage efforts were proven beyond a doubt from get go the USG allowed, decided, or forgot to correct the public's perception. Instead, they were led to to believe Soviet-friendly memes like McCarthyism instead of the reality that the nation's adversaries posed serious threats. Then there was that time where the USG unwittingly decided America and the rest of the world should go hungry and foot the bill for Soviet breadlines. Woops! Didn't think about that one.

The USG belatedly rounds up spies from time to time, but its counter-espionage appears dismal as it ever was. It could be that general government incompetence can no longer be propped up by blessings, luck, or being too big to fail. Alternatively, China could be a far more capable adversary than the Soviets ever were. China is also not without its own incompetent fuck ups despite our general interest and the Iron Curtain Great Firewall. COVID, ahem.

The Soviets were great at espionage but at the end of the day, they were outmatched. USA + Western Europe + Japan > USSR + Eastern Europe + poor China. And China switched sides to the US camp late in the Cold War, which is almost forgotten today. USA + Western Europe + Japan + poor China >>> USSR + Eastern Europe.

And the Soviet system didn't work either, they were consistently behind in basically all fields of technology with rare exceptions. Temporary lead in spaceflight (but not missile force), temporary lead in tanks with the T-64. Far behind in semiconductors, submarines, guided weapons. They had talent but weren't good at innovation. Regardless of ideology it's tough when you and your allies are the poor countries who got hit hardest in WW2 and you're facing the industrialized, rich countries.

China is the biggest manufacturer in the world, they have scale the Soviets never had. Over twice US electricity production, 3x US car production, 13x US steel production, 1.5x more industrial robots per worker. And their system works in that they can do high-tech.

Everything has been getting worse everywhere, always, forever.

And yet here we are.

Taking the USA - the 70s made the BLM years look like a tea-party. Insurrection and a new civil war looked way more plausible then, with amateur militias like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army running around shooting and bombing. And yet - that never happened.

Black Lives Matter movement and the Summer of Saint Floyd has fizzled out.

Yeah, globally we're probably due for a recession and a lot of political turmoil and things are going to hurt for a few years, maybe even a decade. See the Winter of Discontent in the 70s, and indeed the 70s in general for the UK - The Specials were not singing Ghost Town at the start of the 80s about a happy, jolly time. The 80s were terrible for Ireland.

But then things will slowly right themselves once more, until we all tilt to the opposite direction once again.

Theta gang.

Other people do predictions all wrong.

Step one: they feel a slight change in temperature . Maybe they think polarization has increased, or atomization, resource use, artificial intelligence, immigrant problems, low TFR , etc. Could just be a vague feeling of unease with the way things are going.

Step two: they extrapolate that one thing to hell. So if you want a picture want the world in a hundred years, just delta times a hundred, aaaand you’re done. So one guy predicts the earth will be boiling, the other guy predicts total wireheading, another a 1000 IQ machine god, another complete resource depletion, another constant civil wars, yet another a zero point zero fertility rate, or a 99% amish population.

Why all the doomers are wrong:

Step One: It’s a very limited, myopic view. There’s a lot of randomness in the world. Where you are likely experiences some rate of temperature rise that is not typical. Some of the delta is pure gut feeling, nothing solid. There’s a lack of absolute assessment of the situation on a larger timescale. Are we as polarized as catholics and protestants in the religious wars? No, we’re very far from that.

Two: All the predictions are mostly contradictory, they refute each other, even though they may look like a sure-thing syllogism when looked at individually. The system is full of negative feedback loops that stop the simple extrapolation of even correctly identified trends. If a thing causes problems, the thing will eventually be limited, the problems mitigated.

Some of the arguments just look like an excuse to give up: they force this binary we’re screwed/we’re not screwed which doesn’t actually tell us anything . Even some of the worst ‘we’re screwed’ future scenarios they come up with would just be comparable to situations humanity already went through (civil wars, vast migrations, losing your home, starving poverty), and those people didn’t give up either. And that’s a small likelyhood. So chill and grill. Without forgetting to participate in the negative feedback loop of stopping the problems.

As always, the historically aware people have better perspective. Cotton gin is an interesting example. Deeply ironic: making the labor much easier for processing cotton increased the demand for labor for the cotton itself. It still took 30 years for the US slave population to double, and 40 years to double again, and the entrenchment of slavery took 70, all spurred by the technological invention, but the social and economic changes took decades to come to a head with actual war. Most every other important invention in history, even when adopted rapidly, usually takes decades to percolate and fully influence the economy and social fabric of a country.

The "population bomb" people being so obviously wrong is also a great example why the new "population stagnation" people are also probably going to be obviously wrong. "Doom" happens slowly.

I like this post. Yes, the future flatlining and being the same trend forever is unrealistic. My points are more that I don't see any mechanism for some of those issues getting better. Also, you'll hopefully understand that just because humanity already has went through civil wars and starving poverty, that I regardless won't be particularly enthused if it happens again.

No, I want you to be psyched! Life is the ultimate experience, anything can happen! One day you could find yourself in South Africa or Lebanon, without leaving Ohio! Everyone's in trouble. The only question is: are you on top of that trouble or not ?

But in all seriousness, some people literally act like we’ll all be dead in 10 years because of AGI, climate (in Germany they often call them the ‘last generation’ protests ffs), elite mismanagement & evil and what have you. They just throw down their arms: "oh, we’re finished, it's over". The prospect of a civil war, properly considered, should cheer them up. It's not over till the fat lady sings.

Good post. I agree way too many people take their wishy-washy vibes, put them on a chart and then zoom off to infinity.

Theta gang.

If only nothing ever happened...

Lol yeah. Have fun locking your capital up and missing literally everything.

You need to distinguish some things.

First, you need to treat technological and social progress separately. Our civilization has been steadily progressing technologically for several centuries at this point, but it has been one of the biggest lies/self-delusions that the social changes happening alongside were consistent improvements. Some were, some weren't, and mostly it was just a change in the trade-off curve the ramifications of which we still probably haven't fully experienced and can't appropriately judge.

Second, the current state and the pace & direction of change; I agree that western society increasingly seems sclerotic, overregulated and overinterdependent. Nevertheless, the peak we have reached is pretty damn impressive, and even rome took centuries to fully break down, with golden ages lasting decades, long after its eventual fate seemed sealed.

Third, private and public. The reason why conservatives lean happier is that they are, on average, grillers. If you just ignore the public dysfunction, pretend there is nothing you can do about it and focus on ways to improve your own life, it's actually quite easy to get by and be happy. Imo this is the reason why civilizations peak; After reaching some level of prosperity, it's much easier to just pay off dysfunction to not bother you instead of fighting against it. At first it's a great deal, since in % terms it's very little, and there is a lot of inertia about not falling into dysfunction staving off the bad incentives. But what is incentived, grows, and eventually it's "suddenly" substantial, but now so many people depend on it that there is now way of getting rid of it without a revolution. Usually the society is still overall quite prosperous, so they just try to limit the growth at this point, or if you have really competent & conscientious people in charge they may even manage to find a way to slowly whittle down the dependency a bit. But it's a lot of work for almost no return for yourself, while frequently making lots of unnecessary enemies. So, the smartest and most competent at best actively avoid politics & just improve things in small localized ways, or at worst take advantage of the situation to redirect more stuff their way while paying off the important interest groups.

Most Western Democracies aren't electing either far left or far right extremists mostly the policies stay the same. Wasn't Biden a steady moderate elected by a skittish electorate? It didn't seem to have much effect even if he wasn't demonized the way Trump or Obama were.

Biden advertised as a moderate but governed like a radical. Style aside, Trump is still a Clinton Democrat.

Trump isn't a Clinton Democrat as much as he is a 90s era labour-oriented centerist. IE the sort of "old Democrat" that the Clintons and thier "New Democrat" coalition displaced.

governed like a radical

Well... somebody governed like a radical. Jury is still out on who.

Biden was at least aware of and got on board with most of the radicalism. When Biden was a 2020 candidate, he was the sole voice of sanity in the Democratic primary on the question of whether the Presidency could govern like a kingship or whether it had to obey the constitution, but when Biden wanted to govern like a king and the Supreme Court stymied him he went on camera to decry the decision. Shortly after, he explained that "this is not a normal court"; the context on that also included his annoyance that the killjoys wouldn't even let Harvard violate anti-discrimination law at the expense of Asians.

Maybe he governed like a radical because senility made him fuzzy headed or easier to manipulate, but he was at least receptive enough to any manipulation that his hypothetical puppet masters had no problem letting him go on the air to speak for them afterward.

I’m a soft doomer about the US but much less so than I am about (Western) Europe.

Mass immigration has seen fit to proffer the United States a gentle decline toward a high-inequality, mid-tier country with Some Third World Characteristics but probably with semi-functioning politics and many centers of high economic and industrial development. What is coming for Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Britain, and increasingly also Spain, Ireland and Italy is much, much worse than that.

I agree, Western Europe is a disaster. But that is cold comfort, because if anything, I see Europe as just a sneak peak of what America will be someday. That may be backwards. It is Europe that has been aping us, after all. And, as you say, there are important differences, like our immigrants being a better fit.

many centers of high economic and industrial development

So the East and West Coasts, particularly the West Coast, propped up by cheap serf immigrant labour? Spots throughout the rest of the country like the tech hubs in Texas of Austin and Dallas also doing great? Sure, a lot of the country is sliding into decline, but The Economy is going gangbusters through a mix of the giant tech sector massively outperforming everything else and skewing things that way (if AI works out the way everyone is betting their shirt on it working) and the world is still using the US dollar as currency of choice. Yeah, lower middle-class to middle middle-class you can't buy meat anymore and you're living sixteen to a four bedroom house to make rent, but GDP is booming, the market is sky-high, if you own stocks you're okay, so shut up about the economy, stupid!

I could well see that happening.

The average household has 2.0 people in it. There might be people living with fifteen roommates, but this is very much not typical.

In surveys like this, "household" normally is defined so that 15 unrelated adult occupants of a single house count as 15 one-person households. For example, here is the definition used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A consumer unit (CU) is the measurement unit collected for the eligible individuals represented in the expenditure reports.

The CU is defined as

  • all members of a particular housing unit who are related by blood, marriage, adoption, or some other legal arrangement, such as foster children;

  • a person living alone or sharing a household with others, or living as a roomer in a private home, lodging house, or in permanent living quarters in a hotel or motel, but who makes independent financial decisions;⁠ or

  • two or more unrelated persons living together who pool their income to make joint expenditure decisions.

In publications, and with [Consumer Expenditure] respondents, “household” is occasionally used for simplicity, but nevertheless refers to the CU.

So your link is not useful in this context.

This data is from the census, which says:

Households (H table series)

These tables look at the number and type of households in the United States. They describe the size of the household as well as the demographic characteristics of the householder. A household consists of all people who occupy a given housing unit.

So the census considers 15 people in an apartment to be a single household.

It's also eminently reasonable for the BLS and the census to use different definitions of 'household' because roommates don't share their income and act economically independently in ways that the BLS wants to measure, while the census is a population survey and the number of people physically in one housing unit is interesting to them.

two or more unrelated persons living together who pool their income to make joint expenditure decisions.

New term for cohabiting just dropped: "two or more unrelated persons living together."

In surveys like this, "household" normally is defined so that 15 unrelated adult occupants of a single house count as 15 one-person households.

This is insane. I love a good example of governmental statistical fudging, thanks!

No, that was rhetorical exaggeration, but based off cases like this from eight years back:

In a sworn statement, Barry O’Kelly said while conducting research for the programme he came across an advert on Facebook in Portuguese advertising rental accommodation at 79 Old Kilmainham Road.

Prices of €30 per night, €100 per week and €350 per month were quoted.

As a monthly figure had been quoted he said he did not believe the accommodation being offered constituted short-term accommodation and the property was being advertised to the public at large and not simply students.

O’Kelly said he and an undercover reporter, known as Mary, viewed the property.

It appeared to be like a hostel, and was packed with bunk beds capable of sleeping 40 people in three bedrooms.

One bedroom had 16 beds, while other bunkbeds were located in the corridor.

He said the undercover reporter paid €200 in advance for two weeks accommodation.

In a sworn statement, Barry O’Kelly said while conducting research for the programme he came across an advert on Facebook in Portuguese advertising rental accommodation at 79 Old Kilmainham Road.

I wonder if the renters were Portuguese or Brasileiros.

We do have a lot of Brazilians working in the meat processing industry over here (something that surprised me when I learned it). One of the GPs in the practice I attend is Spanish/Brazilian (so I guess that means Portuguese-speaking, though he went to Spain before he came to Ireland - he'd be "White Hispanic" by US census categories) and he was telling me about when he first moved here and the landlord was the 'cash in hand, no rent books, no contract' type that can kick you out in the morning.

"Damn girl, you live like this?"

I am sure there are such situations in America but they are probably limited to illegal immigrants. Considering this ad was in Portuguese, I'm not sure it reflects the living standards of Irish people.

This anecdote isn't intended as commentary on what you wrote, but I feel like sharing.

My area is full of big homes occupied by single retirees and tiny apartments occupied by families. Somehow, whether due to regulation or tax nonsense or what have you, there doesn't seem to be a way of fixing this. Maybe when the boomers really start to die en masse it'll work out.

Actually something I've seen a few times is married boomers who are still 'together' but each live in their own full sized homes near each other as they simply find that more pleasant. Blew my mind the first time but it keeps coming up.

You see this all the time in California. I know a boomer or two who has empty houses that he doesn't even rent out because he doesn't want to bother.

The tax situation for real estate in California is an incredibly sweet deal. Your tax basis is the valuation at purchase time with a yearly increase not to exceed inflation or 2%. Boomers are paying pennies in property tax on all their properties while people who buy a house now can pay ten thousand a year for an ""starter"" house. Another transfer from the productive to the retired.

I know a boomer or two who has empty houses that he doesn't even rent out because he doesn't want to bother.

Pretty much everyone I know personally who has rented out in the past would never rent out again. They'd much rather pay taxes on an empty house than deal with the potential for another tenant from Hell, and they've all dealt with at least one. And these were not people renting out cheap shacks, either.

That's the problem: you get terrible landlords, and you also get terrible tenants. There are people who will take total advantage of being a tenant and just wreck the place and laugh in your face about any consequences. I don't blame people who have a house that they're renting out for spare income but are not 'professional' landlords for deciding the game is not worth the candle, and it's better to just sell the property (or keep it as inheritance for your kids).

You're mixing things up a bit; the depressed places don't have the high housing prices and until the next advance of the progressives, we're still America where even (or especially!) the poor eat meat.

Right now, yes, but the price of meat is rising and who can forecast what things will be like in ten to twenty years time?

The very poor in America do not eat meat. They're not eating rice and beans either, mind- it's a diet of ultra-processed food, made of vegetable oil, additives, sugar, and white flour combined in various forms.

It’s not a great outcome but the reality is that life in eg. Southern Brazil or the nicer parts of Mexico is “fine” for the middle class. Worse, strictly, yes, but bearable.

The situation in what will become of Europe will be far worse than that.

And why much worse?

Because of the character of the immigration. Latinos are largely deracinated, with little shared identity (which is why ‘Latinx’ or la raza stuff is largely the preserve of PMC white-Hispanic academics and the working class Mexican equivalent of Hoteps). Many will vote for a conservative ‘strongman’ caudillo over the left. Many consider themselves ‘white’ regardless of reality, and intermarriage rates are quite high. Many essentially share an ‘American dream’ of being an atomized consoomer with a big pick up truck, a bimbo wife and a McMansion in the suburbs. This may be suboptimal but it is not immediately catastrophic. An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America, but it can probably survive as a polity.

In Europe the same isn’t true with large scale immigration from Islamic societies that have old, deep cultural and religious identities, often with an undercurrent of resentment towards Europeans and European society and separate both particular identities (‘I’m Turkish, not German’) and universal ones (‘I’m Muslim, I’m part of the global Ummah with my brothers and sisters’) that fully supplant the previous civic identity. Intermarriage rates between those from Islamic backgrounds and the natives are so low that in most places they’re negligible (and when they happen almost always involves an indigenous usually-woman converting). Coupled with general dysfunctional migration (including from non-Islamic regions) and the extreme pace of demographic change - faster in most of Europe than the US even if America is at a more advanced stage - and you have a recipe for the complete breakdown of social order and full Lebanonization in the coming years.

Consider that in 1950 the Maronites could easily have carved out their own state. But by the mid-1970s they no longer possessed the demographic strength even though they had most of the money and the technical skills.

It's actually even a bit brighter than you think- red tribe whites are on track to have the highest TFR of any major group in the next year or two(currently tied with hispanics, blacks are a distant third) and that looks to be durable.

No doubt many motteizeans would prefer yankees to be the durable demographic core. But hispanics are reliant on immigration to keep their demographic growth; that will inevitably slow from declining populations in Latin America.

I agree with you that the better parts of Mexico, Brazil, etc are extremely recognizable as a worst case scenario for America and are broadly 'fine' in global terms.

I mostly agree with you, but I think that the levels of integration mean that if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants, while any immigration-caused decline in America will be permanent because the migrants have assimilated.

AFAIK the reason the Maronites did not carve out their own state was because it would not have been economically self-sufficient, they even lobbied the French for the inclusion of Muslim-majority agricultural areas such as the Bekaa Valley into Lebanon in order to avoid a repeat of the famines that had occurred under Ottoman rule. That being said, Maronites and Lebanese Christians in general have a weird sort of self-conception as Lebanese, given that they were the ones who lobbied for their rapey Muslim Lebanese countrymen to come to Australia. I can't imagine Europeans feeling that kind of kinship to their foreign underclass.

if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants,

I'm not sure they can; as in, I'm not sure they have the capacity — particularly if you compare demographics of fighting-age men. And even if they do, that won't be for long — can you still "expel the migrants" when they outnumber you?

Yes. The migrants you see milling around aimlessly in the public squares of London, Berlin, Rome etc. are largely poor, sporadically criminal, disorganized and disconnected. Their numbers will not stop a sufficiently determined Western state. What will stop that state is the lack of political will. There's plenty of capacity, but in a democratic state that capacity is always going to be subject to the whims of elected officials who all have their reasons not to use it.

The migrants you see milling around aimlessly in the public squares of London, Berlin, Rome etc. are largely poor, sporadically criminal, disorganized and disconnected.

Yes, but for how long? Look at the changes in at least British politics — how long before Islamic parties emerge to start providing leadership and organization for those masses.

The largest single non-British ethnic group in the UK is Indians at 2.9%, and they are fairly well-behaved. The largest problematic group is Pakistanis at 2.5%. The idea that there is a single "Islamic" ethnic group that have any shared interest other than pretending to care about Palestine is obviously false if you are familiar with the politics of either the Islamic world or ethnic-minority communities in the UK.

If the UK had the political will to deal with difficult ethnic minorities, they would be easy to defeat in detail. The only people who lump non-whites together are establishment lefties, who while not all-white are noticeably whiter than the census.

I mostly agree with you, but I think that the levels of integration mean that if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants, while any immigration-caused decline in America will be permanent because the migrants have assimilated.

That's my view as well. I can agree with the argument that the Hispanic minority in the US isn't particularly causing large problems for now but we cannot be sure what the future brings.

What do you think it would take for indigenous Europeans to reverse this process, in terms of both will and policy? Is Europe so senescent that it will end with a whimper? The current leaders are a lost cause, but is the younger generation cottoning to what's happening and starting to ask dangerous questions? I have almost no window into this as I don't understand the politics.

Offhand my guess is that, when the welfare states inevitably collapse, the immigrant populations get much more belligerent and manage to provoke even Europeans into self-defense -- first locally, and then increasingly with a resurgent European identity. But again I have no idea how plausible this is.

What do you think it would take for indigenous Europeans to reverse this process, in terms of both will and policy?

Breaking the stranglehold of the GAE / globohomo empire over the UK and the federal German state, which is a US imperialist creation in the first place anyways.

There is no magic breaking point at which things get so bad ideologies necessarily start changing. Maybe something happens, maybe it doesn’t, there are scenarios where Biden ran in 2016 and won, where Trump is still a TV host. Tiny things can change the trajectory. I do expect that the situation will vary between Western European countries, perhaps even significantly.

Latinos are largely deracinated

This is not true. Latinos express their race through their nationalities, the same way Europeans did in older times. You don't see a coherent concept of an overarching Race from them for similar reasons that a White European Identity would have been strange to a European commoner in 1600 - "I am French, what do you mean?"

The Latinx and La Raza stuff is a failed effort to force a singular Hispanic Identity by woke types, but that doesn't mean they don't share a common identity or that one won't form more naturally on it's own as they become a larger cultural block. Younger hispanic kids, IME, do see themselves an being in an ingroup opposed to everyone else, despite longstanding hostilities between some of their origin countries.

I'm not 2rafa, but I would argue similarly on immigration. The advantage that the US has with immigration is that all their illegal immigration is Hispanic. They're not all people you would want in your nation, but the US has already integrated a huge number of them. There aren't big push factors coming that will massively bump numbers up in future, and in legal immigration the US system works pretty well, largely creaming off the best from the rest of the world. The US has relatively limited welfare which means most illegals are in some sense productive, or at least not active drains outside of the criminal elements. The US is also massive and very decentralized. Some states and cities will become swamped and turn into third-world entities, but there will still be dozens of productive urban areas with low levels.

In Europe, illegal immigration is coming from Africa and the middle east. These immigrants are much lower quality. They are poorly integrated, many going into ethnic enclaves and reigniting old tribal conflicts with other groups of immigrants, to say nothing of the dangers of Muslim immigration. They are attracted by generous welfare which they are increasingly exploiting, adding nothing to the host nations. Numbers are large and likely only to grow larger as their home regions increasingly destabilize. I can't speak for legal immigration for continental Europe, but at least in the UK they've somehow ended up importing millions of terrible unproductive immigrants in addition to the illegal flows.

Structurally, each individual nation is also poorly positioned to weather these floods. Productivity is often focused in a single primate city, and once you lose a London, Paris, Brussels, Milan, etc. you've lost most of the nation's growth. Individual areas can do little to fight against the waves. And all this is to say nothing of the respective strengths of the economies

In my western state, there are NGOs specifically targeting african "refugees", shipping them in, and putting them in city subsidized housing. There are tons of africans that run around my neighborhood, more every year. The women walk to the grocery store in 100+ degree weather in their full traditional garb, walking back with the grocery bags balanced on their heads.

If it were limited to hispanics I'd be marginally fine with it. I am quite fond of latin culture, language, food, etc. They mostly assimilate, are catholic, and care about the same things I do. But it's fucking bizarre when my neighbors walk their dogs and the african muslims run to the other side of the street to avoid the unclean canines. Or how their corner of the neighborhood is consistently littered with trash and old furniture in the streets. Our community does a neighborhood cleanup and we just go straight to the african housing. Meanwhile the men sit on their porches watching us whiteys pick up their filth, probably confused at why we would care about things like clean streets.

Then you hear of the haitians descending upon small communities in ohio or minnesota being full of somalians. This is coming to the US and rapidly. The hordes want to live among the whites because the whites create pleasant communities. Five years ago, there were nearly none of these people around here. Now there are tons, and the neighborhoods are deteriorating before my eyes.

Is your basic argument that there's substantial average human biodiversity between Mexican and Central American natives (mostly) and mestizos on one hand and North African and Middle Eastern natives on the other?

I wouldn't say the above argument relies on HBD; integration, decentralization, and excessive welfare would still be problems even with high quality immigrants. Observe the furore in many countries over high levels of indian immigration, despite a high average IQ.

I see so many African Muslims in my area, is distressing. Somalis control large swaths of Minnesota, and Indians are stunningly prominent compared to ten years ago.

It's not just Hispanic.

Advantage of being in a deep red state. They tried to diversify it by sending Muslims and Congolese but the state just doesn't have as much welfare as the blues so many left after the Fed resettlement money gets cut off, and trump cut off the refugee pipeline. I don't see nearly as many as I did 5 years ago. TitaniumButterfly commented on Sacramento, that's where a lot of our Muslims went. Thank you Blue states for your service.

It isn’t just but it is mostly. We’ll see how things are under a future Democratic administration but for now the situation is still vastly preferable.

They control an entire congressional district. None of the Somali Muslims I've seen have married whites, they're all paired up with their own ilk, and that especially applies to the younger generation.

They control an entire congressional district

This is an utterly ridiculous statement that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling. Ilham Omar's district is 17.1% Black, which will include some pre-65 "native" Blacks as well as Somalis. She was sent to Congress by white liberals. There's an important theme here, a lot of what the anti-immigrant Right habitually blames on immigrants is actually done by white liberals.

The last time a republican served on that district JFK was still alive, but not President. White liberals sent her to Congress, but African Muslims sent her to the general election.

I don't think your debunk is worth anything. It's too lazy to take seriously, and you've already been corrected once.

a lot of what the anti-immigrant Right habitually blames on immigrants is actually done by white liberals.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This is the kingmaker scenario, right? Gwern talks about it a bit - if you have three friends, and one friend refuses point-blank to eat non-Halal food, then you will find yourself always looking for halal restaurants even though he’s only 25% of the group. In a very real sense that’s on the other three for not kicking him to the curb, but in a practical sense he’s the one controlling where you go.

There’s also just the straight issue of schelling points. The left in the UK has such kingmaker scenarios a lot with local Muslim populations. If they can’t all agree to ignore them at vaguely the same time, the white liberals who do will be steamrollered by the ones who don’t.

Somalis don't "control" anything.

They have substantial influence in many local elections and a tendency to vote for their own. Such a voting bloc can easily end up in control of all sorts of important positions even while remaining a minority.

They'll breed with the whites in two generations

Interbreeding between the two is negligible and Somalian IQ is low enough that even after some mixing the hybrids will remain an underclass. What's more, the whites they're likely to mate with are in turn the lowest-quality and lowest-status whites, so they wouldn't even be mixing with the average.

This is ridiculous hyperbole

Disagree.

It was very odd to me to visit a Costco in Sacramento recently. I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees. Shoppers seemed fairly evenly split between Asians (mostly Chinese and Vietnamese) and Arabs, with most women in hijabs and even a few in niqabs. The staff was mostly Vietnamese or something like them. I couldn't understand the English of the person at the checkout.

In fact something I've seen a lot more of in general is immigrants with different strains of unintelligible English trying to communicate with each other only semi-successfully. The other day it was some Sikh guys arguing with a Cambodian proprietor. I could mostly understand each but they couldn't understand each other. Considered offering to translate but decided it would be rude.

Where / which Costco in Sacramento?

I grew up in Sacramento, the unincorporated areas of Sacramento County.

Sacramento has frequently seen demographic change, and there were often 'ethnic' neighboords or areas. I've of photo of my grandmother's nearly all white graduating class (1939) from C.K. McClatchy High School. Even the suburbs (built in the early 1950's) my grandparents lived in have seen substantial changes. It had been tree lined and owner occupied, now mostly rentals and all the Modesto Ash were cut down.

I had been away for ~15 years before going back for the first time in 2015. I made another trip in 2016.

The people and places I miss aren't there anymore.

May have technically been Elk Grove.

Elk Grove has certainly seen demographic change.

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He has no way of knowing that.

I will eat the bullet and admit that people of different ethnicities tend to make me uncomfortable in large supply. I like that knowing that the people around me are like me in substantial ways. I have nothing against Chinese or Vietnamese who speak English as a second language, but I don't get the impression that I could speak to them as freely as a white person, if at all, and I think that my social missteps would be more harshly looked upon. Since humans communicate to each other, even as strangers, this has certain effects. For instance, at Sam's Club yesterday, I was asked if I was in line by another shopper, and I explained that I thought I was, but I evidently wasn't, and that furthermore, the line was too long for me to consider it worthwhile. I would not feel so free to give such an explanation to someone significantly different from me ethnically. Also, our definitions of "normal" are quite different. I don't think a practicing Muslim Arab would consider me normal, and I certainly wouldn't consider them normal, either. The details I have heard about immigration in Canada makes me think that even good liberals are generally bothered by vast quantities of foreigners in their country.

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Who said it made me uncomfortable?

What about my comment made you uncomfortable enough to feel the need to say something?

I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees.

When I go to Costco, there is not necessarily a shortage of white people. However, there seems to be a total lack of white people under 40. I assume it's related to day/time when I go, but it's an ominous feeling.

"Ominous" how?

Probably ominius in the same way Arabs in Palestine saw it as ominious, when their neighborhood changed its "vibe" over the decades in first half of 20th century. Or maybe how American natives carefully watched their new neigbors with strange culture. And ultimately they were correct.

Ominous that the land and country my forefathers struggled and fought for is being silently overrun by foreigner who neither share nor respect my values, culture, and race.

Pretty obvious if you consider it for a moment.

"Ominous" how? They're just normal people who are trying to get by let everyone else.

Some of us like having a country / nation. When you import a whole new population, with a completely different culture, with absolutely no attachment, no loyalty, and quite possibly not even basic respect, for the culture that's hosting them, and you see that all the young people are from that foreign culture, and all the old people are from yours, it's pretty clear who's in, and who's out. For example, I read somewhere that 80% of people under 20 in Belgium are not Belgian, effectively that means that that nation is over. For a lot of people that's going to be ominous, even if they people replacing them bear them no ill will.

The enemies are the billionaire class selling out the country, not everyday immigrants raising a family.

What about the everyday immigrants who do nothing all day, and get housed in private hotels, paid for by the government? Or the ones setting up grooming gangs that the police and social workers run cover for?

These are people who stock your grocery store shelves, clean your bathrooms at the malls, pick your fruit.

Yeah, we should be doing that ourselves.

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Hey, Costco shopper! I am very dissatisfied with Sam's Club. They didn't have pork butt yesterday, and their pork loin was 40 cents more expensive than the wholesale store and 40 cents more expensive than their own website said it was. Are you satisfied with Costco meat prices? If only I had one near me. Please tell me more about Costco. What do you like about it? When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?

Please tell me more about Costco. What do you like about it? When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?

My (european) wife's reaction upon entering Costco for the first time could have been described as "awestruck". Like within seconds of entering and seeing the inside, she knew she loved it and that it was one of the best places on earth. And that's just inferior Canadian Costco. I can't imagine what American Costco would do to her.

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When I expressed interest in having a custom house built, my mother nonjokingly suggested that it might be nice to have a house whose interior looked like a Costco warehouse's, with exposed electrical conduits making diagnosis of problems easy. My design has a "flat" (1:12) roof, but no exposed conduits. Still, the wiring should be easy to access through the suspended ceiling.

When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?

Yet the shoppers managed to evade your security, drive to the sacred Costco, and desecrate it with their filthy footsteps!

However, there seems to be a total lack of white people under 40.

Perhaps they’re at work.

It reminds me of how pre-COVID—but even to a lesser extent to this day—if I saw another white-collar-looking young man in the wild during the weekday daytime, we’d often briefly gawk at each other out of surprise like the Umbrella Academy driving meme, such as when we’re pushing shopping carts past each other at the grocery store.

I remember stopping by Trader Joe's during the mid-morning on a day off... completely different demographic from the weekend/evening crowd.

Perhaps they’re at work.

Probably not. I go on weekends around opening time. I realize the demographics might be different at 1pm, 3pm, or 5pm on the weekends compared to opening.

Doomer. If a civil war couldn’t happen over Covid, it’s not going to happen at all. Maybe an uncontested secession or three.

I think the risk of political violence is going up, but it no longer has the level of public buy-in you would need for a civil war. Especially for the youth, which is the primary demographic you would need for that. Zoomers are too checked out and there’s not enough of them, Boomers are too old, and Millennials finally managed to grab a small slice of the pie and are now just a bit too comfortable. I think the primary danger zone in the United States was 2014 to 2021. I think the chances of civil war in Europe are higher, but the most likely scenario is the Day of the Shed, when all the native peoples of Europe rise up and viciously cuck themselves to death Michel Houellebecq-style.

Could you elaborate on the Day of the Shed?

Basically the scenario outlined in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission where Europeans don’t put up any fight at all and basically consent to their own Islamization.

Dating sucks and gender relations are likely going to get worse as the social media experiment continues, to South Korea levels. It can only get worse from here.

I disagree with the parallel (not with your general argument). It's not sociologically possible. South Korea is a rather particular greenhouse in that regard, ethnically homogeneous and largely insulated from external trends, with distorted Confucian and cyberpunk tendencies taken to social extremes. None of that applies to the US or Western Europe either for that matter. I believe in the law that that which can't continue indefinitely, won't, even if it gets worse short-term. The hypergamy crunch is just around the corner. We're already at a point socially where there are three women to two men among new college graduates. This clearly cannot last.

The hypergamy crunch is just around the corner. We're already at a point socially where there are three women to two men among new college graduates. This clearly cannot last.

Why can’t it last? Sure, over timescales some groups will have more children than others, but liberalism is a powerful identity package that has a lot of ability to convert people from conservative backgrounds.

A female-to-male ratio of 3:2 among college graduates means that one in three college-educated women remains childless and single or intentionally becomes a single mom or marries a working-class man. I doubt any current Western society is prepared to normalize such prospects.

A female-to-male ratio of 3:2 among college graduates means that one in three college-educated women remains childless and single or intentionally becomes a single mom or marries a working-class man.

Yes, and I'd say that almost all of them are going to be the first (childless), with a few taking the second option (intentional single mom, likely via artificial insemination or, given aging, IVF). It doesn't matter whether we're "prepared to normalize such prospects" or not, it's what's going to happen.

Have you ever heard of a society where this happened and it yet endured?

First, are there any societies where this happened at all? Secondly, are there ones where it happened with our level of technological sophistication and state capacity?

And third, sure, in the long enough run it probably won't endure — for "in the long run we're all dead" values of long run. There's a lot of ruin in a nation, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

And for the closest examples I can think of, the usual way it was resolved was conquest by higher-fertility (and more patriarchal) "barbarians" with enough military force to impose their social system on (the women of) the newly-conquered people.

But that sort of conquest doesn't look like a thing that's happening much any more — the GAE does a good job of suppressing it. And most of the "barbarians" aren't really doing all that better themselves. Basically, it looks like what a commenter at Jim's said recently:

If you want the truth, the truth is that right now all of mankind is about to go up in one big fire. Without any use of nukes, bombs, or guns, billions of people have already disappeared from the Earth… by not being born.

So what awaits our world-wide South Korea? Probably an Afghan Goat Herder, making his own journey to the west to investigate ancient ruins and whatever trinkets he happens to find (god forbid he thinks we were all funkopop hooligans).

Expect this situation to last (and get worse) for the rest of our lives, at the minimum.

I think they're being normalized as we speak.

South Korea is an extreme example and bringing it up likely weakened the point. I don't mind the idea of things changing to be a more stable equilibrium, but if we're on a cliff, it would make me feel a lot better to know if it's a short drop or a long drop.

I was a doomer 15 years ago. Things have mostly continued to get worse since then, but nowhere near as fast as I expected. The old saying goes that things fall apart slowly, then all at once. I figure it will all fall apart eventually, but I won't pretend to have any idea on the time scale. Anyone who pretends to know when is selling something.

"There are weeks where nothing happens, and there are decades where nothing happens" -Vladimir Chudin

You mixed up the quote man - There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.

They did that on purpose to state that nothing ever happens. Meme joking.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens

I guess the Chudin didn't make the joke clear enough: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2883054-nothing-ever-happens

Ah lol that is where that comes from. I'd seen Lenin referred to as Chudin in the past, I thought it was just an insulting nickname for him. My bad.

I liked your joke. I understood your joke. You can't win 'em all.

Part of this tendency, surely, is that the scale of things is totally incomprehensible to the human brain. I don't know what 50 million dead people at the hands of Vladimir Chudin looks like. I don't know what 700 thousand pounds of steel produced resulting in an ungodly amount of GDP per capita looks like, or how it's even possible at such large quantities. Maybe the rest of society can catch fire but the 700 thousand pounds of steel being produced every year keeps the entire thing afloat. There's just too much of the picture that not only can you not see, but is impossible for you to see.

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