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Interesting comment...
From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor". It's not that I'm completely allergic to your argument, but I do think more evidence is required before, um, deporting everyone you think is genetically incapable of "pursuing generational projects".
I will admit to a bias here. I live in Northern Virginia in a HCOL area where I'm surrounded by immigrants. I grew up here and stayed to raise my family. My eldest is going to enter the same public high school I went to. The children of the first generation immigrants I went to school with now have their own families and, like me, have stayed in the same county to raise their children. They're indistinguishable from my family in the ways that matter to me. The neighborhoods are immaculate and the people are friendly, like they were when I was a kid. The generational project seems to be working pretty well from my perspective! You may have had much more negative experiences with immigrants.
As I said in my first post, I found this forum in a roundabout kind of way through via Alexander Turok's Twitter account. I see he's banned now lol. But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here. That would be fine, of course! I need some ideological diversity in my media diet.
WhiningCoil is flirting with a permanent ban himself, actually.
"Deport them all" is certainly an opinion some people have here, but as loudly as it is sometimes expressed I would not bet that it is prevailing. It's not uncommon for people to make the libertarian argument for open borders, for example--Bryan Caplan has some cachet in the rationalsphere.
I think your circumstances are not unusual. But there is a potential rejoinder you might want to consider--
That's great--my classical liberal heart is warmed--but it would be interesting to know for certain whether you are indistinguishable from their family in the ways that matter to them. If one demographic says "we love everyone, we help everyone equally, this is how we all work together to make the world a better place," but the other demographic responds "thanks for the help, we're going to take everything that is given to us to help our ingroup and, if possible, to become the dominant power, at which point we will then suppress our outgroup." The quote from Frank Herbert's Dune books is--
I am not saying this is how your neighbors think! I hope it is not how they think. But that is the angle and the concern that tends to arise when people make arguments like the one you have made here.
Yeah, I struggle with this myself. I do sometimes wonder whether I'm naive on this issue and if my out-group would extend the same courtesies to me.
What I'd say is that the in-group bias is definitely present in the first-generation immigrants and it results in mini ethnic enclaves being formed, but it's more of a product of not being comfortable with English than it is some deep cultural incompatibility. By the second generation these differences disappear. My kids have Hispanic and Asian friends because me and my wife hang out with Hispanic and Asian families. And there's so much intermarriage! I don't think the intermarriage would be as high as it is if they thought white families were really different from them. This isn't to say ethnic identity is abandoned; not at all, but I think the differences are exaggerated, and if anything, people become much less Chinese, Filipino, and Indian, as they're absorbed into the amorphous American blob.
I wouldn't describe the immigrants I know as being "given" much beyond the opportunity to immigrate to the U.S. That's significant!, but they worked their ass off to climb from their poor neighborhoods to Fairfax County. I also don't think my family is perceived as the "outgroup" in any meaningful sense that affects our well-being.
Basically, I think your objections are too abstract. That's a nice quote, but how are my freedoms being suppressed? I think I would have noticed by now.
Oh, depending on your age, there's a very good chance you're not missing out on any freedoms at all. At worst, maybe you've been passed over for university admissions or a job or a promotion as a result of affirmative action or something--and given the abundance of all those things in America, even then you may not have so much as noticed.
Your comment alludes to the process of integration and I think that historically there is much to be said for it. European immigrants faced much the same concern as that directed toward South and Central American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian immigrants today, but a couple generations later they seem to have integrated entirely. It might be observed that the integration of descendants of African slavery has gone a bit less smoothly, but of course we didn't really start trying to integrate them throughout the nation until about 75 years ago.
Nevertheless, there is in certain corners a tendency of some political groups to assert "whiteness" as a kind of original sin. Job postings listing essentially every demographic except straight white Christian men as "preferred candidates" come up a lot in Canada and even sometimes in the United States. More importantly, just the fact of identifying as "Republican" or "conservative" is enough to get you dog piled and even banned from certain online communities. If you in fact found this space via Twitter, you might not be familiar with some of the more "canonical" writings that created this space, but I heartily recommend them:
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
Neutral Versus Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
None of this is to suggest that I really disagree with you. I have high hopes for the long term, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that liberalism is dead (or if it is, that we should stop trying to resurrect it). But that means I strongly oppose identitarianism both from the Right ("alt-right") and from the Left ("Woke"). Identitarianism is illiberal and works against your own expressed preferences for integration by instead demanding ideological conformity. The worry toward which I am pointing is that identitarianism appears to be on the rise since ~2014, first on the Left and then on the Right. Many people only get alarmed about the identitarianism happening in their outgroup (since the other kind is a personal benefit). But I think also sometimes people don't realize that just because you don't think someone is in your outgroup, doesn't mean they actually consider you part of their ingroup.
What are some of these freedoms that an older person might be missing out on?
Sorry, I was thinking in the other direction--I think young people are the ones who may have better reason to feel this is all constraining their liberty. The 1990s seem to have been "peak America" in several ways--probably the best "Free Speech" era, certainly an economic dream time, cost disease in education had begun but was years from spiraling out of control, etc.
We do have much better video games now, though.
Very debatable, especially if you include the early 2000s.
I appreciate everyone taking the bait, but: I did say 1990s, I would not include the early 2000s (particularly since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) is still among the best-written CRPGs in history).
The Super Nintendo was indeed an excellent console with some timeless classics (FF4, FF6, Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu 2 & 3, Super Mario World, Super Metroid) as well as foundations to future franchises (Mario Kart, Star Fox, Harvest Moon) and strong entries in others. The Nintendo 64 struggled but brought amazing first party titles (Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Super Smash Bros.) while the PlayStation brought mature themes and writing to new prominence. Final Fantasy 7 was a tour de force. No question: the 1990s were fire.
But almost every single franchise I've mentioned so far has stronger entries now. The Final Fantasy franchise has fallen off, but Expedition 33 is as good or better than FF7 along almost every axis but chocobo breeding and cinematic summons. Super Mario Galaxy (and its direct sequel) are better games than Mario 64, and Donkey Kong Bananza on the Switch 2 reinvents 3D platforming with equal aplomb. Red Dead Redemption 2 exceeds the writing, design, voice acting, etc. of basically every game that came before it. It's not just "better graphics," though it certainly has those. The Grand Theft Auto games from III to V were just one masterpiece after another. Even indies--you can argue that Stardew Valley lacks originality since it's just an evolution of Harvest Moon, and yet given a choice between Stardew Valley and the SNES Harvest Moon, I don't know anyone who would pick Harvest Moon.
I sometimes go back and play old games for nostalgia, but I almost always bounce off pretty fast. Some few games hold up surprisingly well but most just don't. We owe past developers a debt of gratitude for breaking new ground but the level of polish the years (and billions of dollars) have brought to the industry can't be ignored. Yeah, bad games get made, but that was always true. The best games of today are leagues ahead of the best titles developed in the 1990s, along basically every axis of comparison except pure originality (since originality was lower-hanging fruit in those days), and I don't even think it's close.
Yes, for me, video games are straight up just the best they have ever been. More than ever are releasing and they are excellent in so many ways. I wanted to hedge this by saying that there are some tradeoffs, like hardware being more expensive, but that's not a factor if you don't want it to be. You can remain an herbivore gamer and just play indie games that run on anything and those are still head and shoulders above most stuff from 30 years ago. We've figured out a lot about how to make things fun since then. And everything is way more accessible now, since you can buy games without leaving your house. I suppose you could say that there is less nostalgia now, if you've been playing games a long time, but that wouldn't be a concern for some kid starting to play video games right now. Also,
Everything else has tradeoffs, at best. Medicine is much better now, but the average age of the United States is much older, and healthcare costs have ballooned. You can reach so many more people with your effortposts and read whatever you want, and that would be great, but it's turned into such a double-edged sword, with echo chambers forming and subcultures within subcultures growing ever more toxic and distanced from reality, and in the last year, we seem to be seeing a return to ideological terrorism. Movies are stunning, but shallow, lacking the balance and variety that the 90s (and 2000s, probably) had. Pop music seems to be more vulgar to me now, and will never be a shared cultural touchstone as it had been in the years before the 2010s, though you can listen to anything from across the entire world now. College is probably actively worse than it was in the 90s, it costs more, there is rampant leftist ideology influencing many classes (though not all, I had plenty of great history courses, the art ones were where I really ran into it), and the degrees seem less useful.
You already mentioned most of that, but if many people thought the 90s was close to the peak, I wonder, had smart phones been invented in the 90s, would the same trends we saw in the 2010s happen, with people widely critiquing lack of healthcare and historical oppression of women and minorities? Would they fail to recognize the golden age they were living in? Probably, if you ask me.
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