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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24821 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Matt Yglesias posted on X an argument in favor of immigration (having trouble finding it now). The argument was basically “you like lasagna right? Well if we didn’t allow Italians to immigrate no lasagna. And now Italians are pretty indistinguishable from other Americans so clearly that will be the case with others such as Somalians. Think of the future lasagna equivalent you’d get with no cost since the immigrants will assimilate.”

Leave aside the HBD argument. It seems to me that one Matt and those who make this argument miss is the massively different technology that exists today that didn’t exist in yesteryear. If you left Italy in the late 1800s, you couldn’t easily get back routinely to see family (whereas now it’s maybe a days travel). You couldn’t FaceTime them at a whim. You couldn’t text message them. The populations were truly cut off.

It is likely harder to assimilate in the modern world where immigrant populations are not cut off as opposed to the old world. So pointing to historic examples of assimilation do not hold for today because the factors have changed. Now maybe you still think there will be assimilation for different reasons. But you need to make that argument. Comparing like and unlike however cannot be your argument.

I don’t think this is some kind of groundbreaking point but why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument? Maybe they aren’t smart. Maybe they don’t encounter enough arguments to the contrary. Or maybe they are propagandists. I can’t help but think repeating a catechism has value to building political unity even (perhaps especially if) it’s fake.

There are a lot of reasons why Muslims have a lower chance of assimilation: the religion allows for shame and correction and ostracization; they emphasize ritual purity, and every religion that does this has a stricter in/out group preference, eg gypsies and Haredim, because it conditions the mind to see others as unclean; they are inherently Arab and Arabized, because the whole religion is in Arabic and all prayers and all major commentaries, and the translations are not considered inspired, and all the centers of theology are in Arab countries, so there’s a constant pressure toward exclusion; Muslim countries want to sustain a strong Islamic in-group preference for biological and political reasons, which will always be stronger than Catholicism’s reasons of piety, and they are definitely finding ways to transfer large sums specifically for this reason; the story underlying Muhammad and the Quran is one of fierce exclusion and struggle, as opposed to the Christian story where the early Christians mingle freely; Islam has an entire corpus dedicated to how you present yourself publicly, so once your town or city becomes majority Muslim there’s now peer pressure for how you dress etc; Catholicism is frankly just a weekend lecture and nothing more for the vast majority of Catholics; Catholics were assimilating into a dominant culture that is, compared against Islam, 99.99% similar in all the important beliefs; the most extreme Catholics become priests and have a TFR of 0, while the most extreme Muslims become Imams and have a TFR of 3+

These are very basic things that a commentator should know. “Muslims will assimilate because Catholics did” is a really terrible take because it just ignores all the unique factors in both religions.

To me, this reads in part like a plea for the Latin mass

Edit: more flippant than I meant. It’s a good post. Just was thinking about the language part

If you left Italy in the late 1800s, you couldn’t easily get back routinely to see family (whereas now it’s maybe a days travel). You couldn’t FaceTime them at a whim. You couldn’t text message them. The populations were truly cut off.

This probably cuts the other way. Everyone everywhere is already partially pre-assimilated to US cultural hegemony.

Superficially sure. They all know who captain America is. But that doesn’t mean they’ve accepted American culture norms about say blasphemy laws.

See, I think this argument fails even worse than you. If you go back to, say 1875, and read what the opponents to immigration were saying, they seem quite prescient. They would argue things like that immigrants would congregate in cities and be exploited/power corrupt political machines that would eventually spill into national politics and the whole constitutional order would be altered... which all happened and culminated in the New Deal.

Ex-ante, one could argue assimilation into the US is easier now than ever, given everyone's Always Online, the dominance of US cultural influence, increased English adoption, and the general reduction of worldwide linguistic diversity.

However, I highly disagree that assimilation into the US (or any other country) should be the key metric for immigrants in and of itself, at least as commonly used.

Latinos (whether they be legal or illegal immigrants) are commonly proposed as a population group who assimilate well, yet they assimilate insofar as they assimilate into the bell-curve space between white and black Americans. "Not as disruptive and negative value-add as US blacks are to the rest of the US" should not be the litmus test for the immigration policy of any country.

For the modal white or Asian American, it'd be more than understandable if he or she prefers immigrants who assimilate well to the right-side of the bell-curve, as to not create more net-tax consumers, violent crime producers, or affirmative action claimants by way of the immigrants themselves and/or the immigrants’ descendants.

I’m generally in favor of controlled legal immigration, but I just don’t understand the food and music angle. Those things frankly don’t matter at all. Like, okay, suppose I transport you to his nightmare alternative universe in which Americans have never tasted lasagna. Okay, so is it that bad? Is America truly worse off if we don’t have pasta?

The urbanite’s favorite social leisure activity is trying a new restaurant. They make plans in advance around it, it’s where they sustain their friendships, it’s where they experience novelty without drugs, it’s a whole big thing. There aren’t that many novel spaces that you can relax in which aren’t a restaurant in a city.

Humans also just naturally become addicted to new food and clothes, because they experience these every day. You see corrections against this in the Bible for this reason: “is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”, and “for the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. But where will an irreligious progressive hear a correction against becoming addicted to novel food, unless they’re into stoicism and mindfulness?

Being a foodie is arguably the sine qua non of pmc membership. Matt doesn’t realize how little it actually matters because it’s the air he breathes.

The food angle is standard boilerplate for multiculturalists. It comes with sub-arguments like 'no you aren't allow to cherrypick only the cuisine, you have to accept all of the culture's ethics and strange behaviours without complaint' and 'no you aren't allowed to just buy the cookbook and not let the immigrants come. That's cultural appropriation'

And it's not like foreign foods and music never make it to the US without mass immigration. We've all eaten pad thai and listened to flamenco, yet there's few or no Little Bangkok neighborhoods or ghettos full of Catalonian gypsies.

European food is bad across the board, but my life would be materially worse if I didn't live in a city with lots of ethnic food options.

  • -10

I don't know, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Italian, and Greek food all seems pretty well regarded.

I am aware that they are well-regarded. I stated (correctly) that they are bad.

You! I don't know whether you went to some knockoff Oktoberfest or a tourist trap, but if you think German food is bad then your opinions are wrong and your taste is bad!

I'll give you German and Polish, and you can chalk up Spanish, Greek and maybe even Italian to a matter of taste, but to claim French cuisine is bad is either a grug-tier or a contrarían for its own sake opinion.

I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just that we’re used to it and it’s been run through the commercial food chain much more so than other foods. If I want Mongolian cuisine, chances are im looking for a mom a pop restaurant, or buying the ingredients to make it myself. If I want American food, I can go get McDonald’s hamburgers and fries that are made at an industrial scale out of cheap, shitty ingredients and made with indifference by a teenager with an attitude. That’s not a fair comparison, you’d have to actually compare a top quality hamburger made in a mom and pop restaurant from high quality ingredients to the same in a Mongolian restaurant. I think other than the familiar flavor profile from the burger, they’re probably about the same.

European food is bad across the board

I just felt a great disturbance in the force, it's as if 60 million Frenchmen just groaned in an instant.

Not to mention the nonnas.

I mean, let's get real, French food is kinda meh, even German cusine is better.

Bait used to be believable.

My plans to start World War 3 foiled again.

It is easy to find counter the argument. You can eat a Big Mac in Jakarta, but that doesn't mean there are a lot of US-American migrants in Indonesia. Most places who make Lasagna are not operated by Italians. There are good sushi places in Budapest, even though there is no big japanese diaspora in Hungary. It just means Sushi is delicious.

There are a literal handful of good sushi places in Budapest, the reality of having to fly in the good stuff does limit you relatively far inland. That said, it might have the cheapest Nobu in the world, which I’ve always found interesting.

Yeah, but the structural limitations of seafood markets far from the sea have nothing to do with the presence or absence of Japanese people.

You know who cooks thé food at the restaurant scene in DFW? I’ll give you a hint- regardless of the ethnic coding of the food being served, the kitchen operates in Spanish. This is true regardless of the quality level. You don’t need actual ethnics to have good ethnic food. People like sushi, so it’s worthwhile to train Hondurans(or whatever thé local source of cheap semiskilled labor is) to prepare it.

I certainly agree with that. They say Tokyo has excellent French food, although I can’t remember having had any.

It’s, uh, rather off-topic, but recent events have cemented an association between the name Yglesias and the term “hereditary communist aristocrat” in my brain.

We’ll see if this particular damage is permanent.

EDIT: Theoretically-working link

link's broken.

Fuck it, we’ll do it live, then

/images/17591898119670463.webp

Not sure if broken or just censored by reddit mods (press F to pay respects, RIP in peace), but I'd venture a guess it's a reference to Pablo Iglesias and Pablo Iglesias, unless there's another commie called Y/Iglesias I'm not aware of.

I think it's referring to his grandfather, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Yglesias "the patriarch of a writing family."

Post is filtered, as is tradition.

Massive Catholic immigration irreparably changed the character, society, and government of the United States. America is lower trust because of it. The new predominantly Catholic voters in the Northeastern cities altered the political balance of the United States. One can go overboard with this (easy to say that Hart-Cellar wouldn’t have happened without major Catholic and Jewish immigration, but similar things happened in various other Northern European Protestant countries that had very little of either), but there is a limit to calling the impact overstated, too. The world of Anglo-America that existed before the 1880s is dead and buried. Old WASP Boston, old WASP New York, old WASP San Francisco, these places are as vanished as Christian Anatolia or Parsi Mumbai; whether through conflict or simple attrition they have ceased to exist. America is lower trust, more violent, more divided and more selfish than it would have been if the mass immigration of 1865-1920 hadn’t happened. For all the talk at how horrified many Founding Fathers would be at the America of 2025, they would have been horrified too at the America of 1925 and its ethnic character.

Nevertheless, Lovecraft’s shrieking aside, it is also fair to say that America is still extremely wealthy, that its greatest global outperformance followed that period, and that in the end those disparate populations still managed to come together and build a relatively well-functioning civilization, at least for a while.

I strongly disagree with laying blame on the Catholics, and I'd actually lay the fault at the feet of culture of the Chesapeake pointing fingers elsewhere. While you could view the Virginia and Maryland colonies as high trust through the eyes of the planter class (in their intereactions with members of the same class), it was absolutely a low trust, chaotic mess in every other regard, and much of modern American low trust culture has its roots here.

From the everpresent threat of rape looming over every woman by men of a higher class than her, to the significantly higher crime (and especially property crime) rate compared to the other colonies, to the absolute reverence for individual freedom (including the freedom to enslave), to the near worship of fortune and luck as a prognostication of God's general favor, to the gentry asserting themselves as arbiters of what messages the clergy can deliver, to the most popular lesiure activies of all classes and ages being the slaying of some sort of animal (in porportion to their rank in society), to prohibitions on education of both the slave and servant classes, to the ubiquity of class condescension, to the general preference for violence and permanent disfigurement as means of punishment for transgressions, the entire society was structured to create about as little trust as a highly decentralized society could ever managed.

Anyone of a higher class interacting with one of a lower had to rightly worry that they were dealing with a violent savage with a short fuse that could snap at any moment. Anyone of a lower class intereacting with one of a higher had to rightly fear that they'd be subject to any and all forms of abuse with no possible form of redress.

Another driving consideration is that of all the original colonies, the bay colony, and later the south as a whole, saw the largest geographic redistribution to the greater west of any of the original colonies, and largely brought their culture with them. In most cases of 19th century inland immigrant migration, the immigrants were moving to places already well tread by Anglican diaspora, and were subject to their existing practices. As elsewhere, the first settlers have a massive, disproportunate impact on the culture well beyond their size (as @quiet_NaN also correctly points out about the Quakers, who might have the greatest impact:population ratio of any American migrant wave).

Massive Catholic immigration irreparably changed the character, society, and government of the United States. America is lower trust because of it. The new predominantly Catholic voters in the Northeastern cities altered the political balance of the United States.

Revisiting Scott's review of Albion Seed, I agree that homogeneous Puritan and Quaker settlements were probably very high trust. But that was only two of the four groups. The Borderers were always low trust, and the Cavaliers were nominally Anglicans, which is what you get when you take Catholicism and substitute the pope with the king of England.

The Quakers were already not the dominant religion in Pennsylvania by 1750, hard to blame Irish Catholic immigrants for that. I assume that it was kinda similar for the Puritans? First you have the Mayflower generation from 1620 on: people who were willing to life a life of hardship for their religious beliefs. It is basically impossible not to get a high-trust society from that (apart from these unfortunate witch trials). But I would imagine that there is some regression to the mean over time, which is of course accelerated by religious heterogeneity, with John Adams seeming a lot less hardcore Puritan than his earlier ancestors.

I am not saying that Irish or Scottish Catholics arriving in 1860 did not lower the trust level, but simply that it would not have been so different if the US had only let in Protestant Germans of various sects. Once your neighbor goes to a different church than you, the common knowledge that you have identical moral beliefs pitilessly enforced by your community will disappear.

The world of Anglo-America that existed before the 1880s is dead and buried. [...] old WASP San Francisco,

Reading up on the history of SF, SF basically before the gold rush of 1849 was basically a village. Early SF was basically a hive of scum and villainy, not surprising if you select for "people who want to get rich finding gold" instead of "people who go to the New World to escape the godlessness of the Old World". Sure, things calmed down a bit, but I think SF was never high trust.

Puritan New England always had a substantial contingent of non puritans because it was structured to have a non-puritan and non-voting minority. Full membership in the puritan church was not guaranteed hereditarily, either, and was necessary for suffrage, so restricting membership concentrated political power, and it was probably unavoidable that New England wouldn’t remain majority puritan.

Because Twitter encourages sloppy arguments? You could even say they’re not sending their best.

Speaking of which, a folk argument with no authoritative reference sounds like the exact opposite of “catechism.” But I’ll leave it to the Catholics to litigate that one.

Ceteris paribus, I agree that international travel and communication makes it easier to avoid assimilating. How about intranational? The interstate highways have to be more appealing than riding the rails if you want to get to Chicago or California. Immigrant communities don’t have to be as concentrated, and cheap labor can get where it wants with less friction. I would expect this to boost assimilation but also increase immigrant visibility, both cultural and economic.

When Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup, it was supposed to be a parable about keeping safe one's inheritance and revering one's forefathers. You're not supposed to actually do it, or say that it's a good thing!

Being unkind, he's just not very smart.

Being alternatively unkind, he's smart but abusing the simplified mythology revolving around how most people understand immigration and how it occurred in the late 19th/early 20th century.

I find it amusing that he's trying to use Italians as an example. If we treated Muslims and Somalians the way we treated Italians back then, we'd have a large number of people loosing their minds over it.

It's hard not to point at the God Shaped Hole in Yglesias' specific argument here.

When people point to the immigration "success" of Italians, Irish, Poles, Germans, Scandinavians, and Mexican and Central Americans of yesteryear, it's hard not to see the Pope in the background doing the Jeremiah Johnson nod of approval. Even for non-catholic groups, they were still Christian. That basic scaffolding is doing a lot of work; perhaps fueled by lasagna, I can't say.

@CrispyFriedBarnacles brings up the history of Jews in America below, and I think that's a really good argument against what Yglesias is trying to say here. Some Jews in America have fully assimilated. But there are dozens of communities that have not only no assimilated, they actively resist American ways of life to an extent that, I believe, is probably unconstitutional. How is Kiryas Joel, NY don't constantly fighting equal protection and/or discrimination cases?

I think it's harder to assimilate now because people are showing up with basic values structures that are either vastly different than even the most modernized (not progressive) pop culture American values or, more commonly, without a functional values system at all. If a new immigrant has the basic concept of "be a responsible member of the community" in place, the local society can gently pressure him or her to refine those to whatever particular style they want. But if people are showing up with nothing beyond "maximize personal utility" we're then in a situation of literally importing millions of game-theory defectors and free-riders.

I've seen some talking points from both left and right along the lines of "immigrants work so much harder! They take all the crappy jobs and they live jammed on top of each other!" Yeah, well, I don't want to be part of a society that has a median tending towards crappy jobs and over-code cohabitation. I like the idea of upskilling and of throwing automation efforts at the really dangerous jobs. I like the idea of a couple being able to afford their own - modest - home before they're 30 years old. People like to sneer at the white underclass because they're getting outcompeted by recent immigrants. To the extent that this is true (limited) it is only because a race to the bottom is happening and the undercutting of wages has led to a class level decline in standard of living.

Even for non-catholic groups, they were still Christian.

I think you substantially underestimate the intensity of Anti-Catholicism in 19th century Protestant nations. Nowadays the Protestant-Catholic conflict is pretty much dead outside of a couple of marginal weirdos, but that wasn't true 150 years ago. It obviously wasn't as spicy as it was in, say, the 17th century, but Anglo Protestants were liable to view Catholicism as backwards and politically threatening.

Also, uh, there's presently an incredible amount of animosity directed towards overwhelmingly Catholic Latino immigrants.

I think it's harder to assimilate now because people are showing up with basic values structures that are either vastly different than even the most modernized (not progressive) pop culture American values or, more commonly, without a functional values system at all.

I think the claim that contemporary immigrants are not assimilating is not really in evidence and (to the extent it's not just a gloss on general nativism) rests on an incorrect view of historical assimilation as being far less contentious amongst natives than it actually was. Intermarriage rates are high, language uptake is faster than ever, etc... I strongly suspect that most of the angst over immigrants not assimilating is not actually based on immigrants failing to assimilate but a) fearmongering from the subset of anti-immigrant types who really do just hate immigrants b) more importantly, proxy concerns over domestic culture wars. Like, Indian and Chinese immigrants assimilate superbly, but they mostly assimilate to the Blue Tribe.

The claim that many immigrants don't have a values system at all strikes me as absolutely wild - where are these deracinated sociopaths coming from?

People like to sneer at the white underclass because they're getting outcompeted by recent immigrants.

People like to sneer at the white underclass for a lot of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with immigration, but with respect to immigration they get sneered at because they've opted to use immigrants as a scapegoat for their own problems.

@CrispyFriedBarnacales

Is that his Mexican alter-ego?

Ha. Fixed, and thank you.

How is Kiryas Joel, NY don't constantly fighting equal protection and/or discrimination cases?

This is not unique to them; there are FLDS owned towns that just blatantly violate the law all the time.

Sure but one is in the worst land in the lower 48, very hot, less than a foot of rain per year and a population density that doesn't even round to 1 person per square mile while the other is within the biggest metro area in the nation.

I agree with most of your comment, but this:

Even for non-catholic groups, they were still Christian

is kind of a funny framing, given that America was a mostly Protestant nation that begrudgingly accepted Roman Catholics. It would have been more accurate to say, “Even for non-Protestant groups, they were still Christian,” though not all Protestants would have accepted that designation.

I'm a wannabe TradCath, so the bias is there.

But more to the point, I suppose I meant this in a "they were still culturally Christian" sense. Yes, protestant American wasn't thrilled with the initial influx of Catholics and, in some cases, were quite openly hostile to them.

There's two fallacies here. The first is that it is impossible to get ethnic food without mass immigration from that country. That's obviously nonsense, with the internet and online shopping, you can buy basically any foodstuff in the developed world, regardless of whether your country has had immigration from where that food comes from.

The second is that 'assimilation' is magic and can make everyone behave like white Americans (or even better, Asian Americans). The existence of a dysfunctional African American underclass that has existed for 400 years in spite of the end of slavery, legal equality, affirmative action and astonishing wealth (African Americans are richer than Europeans in Europe) puts paid to that.

I do wonder why Yglesias would make bad arguments like this though. I thought all the liberals were supposed to be secretly reading Steve Sailer? Maybe he genuinely has no intellectual curiosity as to why different ethnic groups have such vastly different outcomes.

The back of the house in your authentic ethnic restaurants are mostly staffed by Mexicans and Central Americans.

I don’t know what point I’m making here, but the idea that we need immigrants for culinary diversity is somewhat incongruous with the homogeneity of who cooks the food.

I don’t think Matt Yglesias has a particularly coherent worldview. He certainly has read Sailer, Murray, Yarvin and others. So has Scott, of course, who is also still a liberal if a less confident one than Yglesias.

My guess is that Yglesias accepts that some form of HBD is true but thinks it can be mediated by rapid economic growth, the flynn effect, affirmative action and deciding not to speak about it ever. This isn’t even an uncommon opinion, it was the default view of a large proportion of the American progressive elite between the 1950s and early 1990s.

The first is that it is impossible to get ethnic food with mass immigration from that country. That's obviously nonsense, with the internet and online shopping, you can buy basically any foodstuff in the developed world, regardless of whether your country has had immigration from where that food comes from.

(I'm assuming you meant "without mass immigration")

These days we in America have a different problem, where it's hard to get anyone at all to cook food in restaurants. The low pay and terrible work conditions just drive out any normal person with options, especially when you can make so much more in a tipped position like waitstaff. The only people doing it are either crazy people who couldn't get a job anywhere else, or immigrants. So in a way we do kinda need mass immigration to support those cheap restaurants and delivery services, and ethnic ones can get away with the most avoidance of immigration laws.

Of course we could also just cook for ourselves but who wants that.

The low pay and terrible work conditions

Wouldn't less competition for such jobs lead to better pay and work conditions?

Maybe to an extent, but both factors are structural- restaurant kitchens are inherently tons of not super pleasant work performed alongside drug addicts for long and often unusual hours, and if you raise pay too much you have to raise your prices above what the market will bear.

Maybe to some extent. But from what I've seen, the more common pattern is that the restaurants just shut down, either from lack of reliable cooks or from hiking prices to the point that no one wants to eat there anymore.

Yes. Groceries have a low elasticity of demand -- if food prices double, I might replace some brand items with knock-offs, but I still need to buy something to eat.

By contrast, restaurants have a high elasticity of demand. If restaurant prices double, people will just buy more microwave food instead.

In a way, a la carte restaurants a luxurious service: you order and someone needs to prepare your dish on demand, just for you. Sure, the specifics differ, adding toppings to a pizza or a crepe is much less labor-intensive than preparing a steak, but at the end of the day you do not benefit from the effects of scale which most industrial processes (including pre-cooked food) have.

Personally I really enjoy the simple, no frills restaurants that just have 1-3 items on the menu and make them in large quantities but really well. Unfortunately a lot of people (boomers I guess?) still seem to love the menus with a huge thick menu of 50 different things, and interrogating the waiter to find out which one of them they should choose. Hopefully restaurants find a way to adapt, like those coffeeshops where a robotic arm makes the drinks.

I don't think assimilation is harder today, or at least its a wash with the various technological and social changes. Especially for assimilation into and out of American culture, because so much of American culture has become world culture.

What does it matter that they can face time back to Italy when Italy is also watching MTV, eating at McDonalds, buying coffee at Starbucks, and talking about 21st century technology using barely converted English words? This same phenomenon makes traveling as an American simultaneously easier and more boring.

Lets not forget that past immigrant populations found plenty of ways to resist assimilation. Every "Little [Country]" in a big city is usually a past example of an immigrant population congregating together and avoiding assimilation as long as possible.

Matt Yglesias posted on X an argument in favor of immigration (having trouble finding it now).

...

why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument?

I think you pre-emptively answered your own question.

Anyways, its not like its hard to find a more thought out exposition on why immigration proponents want more immigration. Bryan Caplan did a whole book on the topic where he tried to make the arguments approachable for laymen: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960

Twitter/X is a place where you can throw out a lot of arguments. And see which arguments stink or are good depending on the reactions. You are implicitly buying into a culture war framing on the whole thing by treating arguments as soldiers. You can certainly downgrade your opinion of certain commentators if they make a bunch of dumb arguments, but dumb arguments in favor of a thing does not make that thing wrong or incorrect.

What does it matter that they can face time back to Italy when Italy is also watching MTV, eating at McDonalds, buying coffee at Starbucks, and talking about 21st century technology using barely converted English words? This same phenomenon makes traveling as an American simultaneously easier and more boring.

Uh, are the countries these particular immigrants come from also buying coffee at Starbucks, eating at McDonalds, and talking about 21st tech?

This starts to hit on the other argument against accepting these immigrants: they come from third world backwaters that can't even maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep a McDonalds operating, and this is likely because the people are just that incompetent.

Generally American corporations have spread to everywhere they are allowed.

Poor countries often have more rules and operating a legal business without bribing a bunch of people is impossible. International corporations are unwilling to cross that line for good reasons.

I feel that calling corruption incompetence is disingenuous. Most European nations were equally impossible to operate in legally a few centuries ago. That's just how poor economies and politics tend to mingle.

Generally American corporations have spread to everywhere they are allowed.

Hell, even some places they weren't allowed!

I feel that calling corruption incompetence is disingenuous. Most European nations were equally impossible to operate in legally a few centuries ago. That's just how poor economies and politics tend to mingle.

This doesn't seem accurate if you exclude the Eastern European states.

Corruption in the U.K., France, and Germany was/is generally carried out by non-state actors. Organized Crime, Mafia, and maybe international corporations. I'll certainly grant Italy is up there. And I think the BIG sign you're in a true Kleptocrat state is if your military is taking bribes and/or selling equipment on the side, which I do not believe is happening in Western European nations.

Scandinavia as a whole has no reputation for corruption that I'm aware of.

The prevalence of corruption of State actors themselves seems more common in Russia and the Post-Soviet states, any given Middle Eastern or African Country you could name, And Central and parts of South America. I'm excluding Mexico because that whole situation is 'complicated' by the existence and influence of powerful Cartels.

At the very least, 'civilized' countries have formalized the process for bribing the government so its mostly done in plain sight and with an air of plausible deniability. That said, individual cities/local governments in the U.S. Certainly read third-worldy in their approach to graft. I wasn't aware of it being common practice to bribe cops even in Chicago but a quick Google search turned up this recent story lol.

So maybe the correlation between corruption and competence can be seen in how 'naked' the bribes and graft are or if there are robust detection and enforcement mechanisms that aren't themselves hopeless compromised.

A few centuries ago, there was no German state. Instead you had a bunch of larger and smaller states, which were certainly not above rent-seeking whenever they saw a profit to be made. At small state sizes, there is some kind of force unification happening: the taxman and the highwayman merge into the robber baron.

At the very least, 'civilized' countries have formalized the process for bribing the government so its mostly done in plain sight and with an air of plausible deniability. [...] individual cities/local governments in the U.S.

I think that Trump has mostly done away with the air of plausible deniability, as far as the federal government is concerned. Politicians were always beholden to big donors and willing to bent over backwards to make sure they got their wishes, but Trump is pimping out the US for cheap. Trouble with the DOJ? Buy some of his shitcoins to signal that you are on Team Trump, and your troubles will disappear, after all, his DOJ is meant for going after his enemies, not random criminals.

The lines are often blurred between state and non-state actors. That is usually part of the problem with corruption, that the state hasn't fully locked down a monopoly on violence.

I was mentally thinking of France and Scotland when I thought of corrupt state actors.

It's been the longest amount of time since they were bad about corruption, but they absolutely were not free of it in 17th and most of the 18th centuries. The king of France would sell these tax collector positions that were basically approved banditry. In England it was difficult to run anything larger than a family business without the backing and often bribing of a noble. These places were absolutely corrupt in a way that we would all call "third world".

I'm excluding Mexico because that whole situation is 'complicated' by the existence and influence of powerful Cartels

This is not, by Latin American standards, particularly unique. Thé much poorer golden triangle countries south of there are(or, in the case of El Salvador, we’re up until recently) even worse. Columbia and Ecuador certainly have extreme problems of their own with the same thing. And some of the Caribbean nations are just as bad. Brazil also has a problem with it, although granted everything I’ve heard about it is that Eastern Europe style bribery is also common there.

We know about Mexico’s problems with the cartels because it’s huge and nearby. Something like a quarter of thé world’s Spanish speakers live in Mexico, it’s the standard dialect, it’s relatively wealthy(by Latin American standards), it borders America, etc.

Right, the thing that stands out to me is that the Cartels very actively prevent the government from ever becoming less corrupt by literally murdering anyone they can't buy out before they can attain public office. Back before reddit banned /r/narcofootage it was actually crazy to see vids of Drug Kingpins rolling around in massively up-armored pickup trucks with gold-plated AK-47s. They get away with absolutely absurd amounts of violence on a daily basis, and while individual acts don't get punished, most of 'em eventually get got in the end. Except El Mencho.

So one can correctly say that the Cartels as a whole are a "parallel" sovereign occupying the same territory. Which isn't really true of anywhere else that I'm aware of. The primary government isn't really able to oust this force, unless they get outside help. Now, if they did get outside help, and they committed to it fully to the extent that El Salvador did, I bet they make good progress.

Notable, on the topic of European corruption, that is how Fascist Italy broke the Mafia for a period of time, which might have led to the strengthening of the Italian Mob in the U.S. thanks to displacing the leadership.

Russia seems to have fully intertwined its organized crime with its state apparatus.

The U.S. at large seems to have managed to keep its violent criminal element from comingling too much with its political class, AND has relatively low levels of "Politician being handed cartoonishly large bags of money in secret" type of corruption. I'll grant "insider trading out the wazoo" is a factor, of course. MAYBE that's a distinction without a difference. Of course, in my local area, the Sheriff got hit with a Federal Investigation for literally taking a cash handout. And he's Italian (his name is CARMINE MARCENO), so maybe its just a culture inclination.

Also, our politicians do seem to have a weakness for sexy foreign agents.

Which isn't really true of anywhere else that I'm aware of

Lots of other examples in Latin America, lots of ideologically driven examples in the Middle East.

Where in the Middle East, at this point?

The Taliban 'officially" controls Afghanistan, ISIS doesn't have much territory to speak of, the Petrostates are pretty much uncontested in their borders. I guess Syria is still chunked up after the rebels actually got Assad to leave.

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For Somalia specifically, the whole ‘failed state because of perpetual multiple ongoing civil wars’ is probably a bigger factor in their poor infrastructure than the low human capital of the population.

I mean Somalia is especially terrible, but none of their closest neighbors (nor subsaharan Africa as a whole) are doing particularly great either, so I'm not sure that argument holds much water:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonald%27s_restaurants

Kenya shares a border with Somalia, and seems to be doing ok. It's still a very poor country, but conditions are rapidly improving there. Life expectancy at birth of 64 years rising at about 0.2 years / year, GDP per capita rising 6% / year, infant mortality of about 3% and falling rapidly (similar to how the US was in 1950).

Kenya has no McDonalds but it does have Burger King, KFC, and Coldstone Creamery. And also Uber Eats.

Kenya is still incredibly poor but it's poor in a normal country way, not in the bodyguard and armored vehicles are not optional for foreigners way that Somalia is.

Bit of a chicken and egg problem there.

Having 'perpetual multiple ongoing civil wars' seems to be a feature of places that have low human capital.

Hypothesis: if the local genetic stock is selected against intelligence, then the odds of a Napoleon or Charlegmagne-esque unifying figure with the competence to hold the region under their thumb arising by chance is just lower.

Haiti is a useful example, since its not even in conflict with any nearby enemies, and has been independent of colonial forces for centuries. Indeed, it should benefit from proximity to the U.S. and South American economies. And still can't hold its shit together.

Zimbabwe fought a war to oust its own european population and then once it succeeded got involved with wars in neighboring countries almost immediately, and also attempted Genocide.

It does seem that the ability to wage brutal campaigns of destruction against your peers, then come together and bury that hatchet and actually abide by the peace for a few decades is rare in history, and seems more prevalent in the Anglosphere. Australia and Canada have made it for Centuries without civil warring.

Australia and Canada have made it for Centuries without civil warring.

Low population density probably plays a role there as well.

Yep.

But then you look at Russia.

Part of the reason I limited my point to "The Anglosphere."

You argue that the relative lack of technology back then necessitated a higher degree of assimilation, but it’s not evident why this wouldn’t actually have the opposite effect. It could very well incentivize immigrant groups to form even stronger enclaves.

For instance, if I were to visit China, but you took away machine translation and the ability to easily contact my family, one of the first things I’d do for security and comfort would be to find a reliable expat community. While technology does allow people to hold onto their roots, it also enables them to branch out.

It also means that they can start assimilating even before they arrive!

I’m not saying technology necessarily makes assimilation harder. I’m saying it easily could and thus citing historic immigration assimilation is irrelevant unless you can strongly make the case that tech doesn’t matter or makes it better.

It also enables the people in their home countries to exercise some level of control over them that would otherwise not be possible.

The other big thing that comes up is Remittances back home, where the home country's denizens are actually dependent on their American relatives for a lot of support.

(didn't realize they were almost a full TEN PERCENT of Pakistani GDP!!!)

Which... that certainly adds a major incentive for the home country to keep the immigrants loyal so they continue to care enough to send the kickbacks, doesn't it?

I think at the core the real problem is that no universal arguments are actually possible in these spaces, and it really is who / whom all the way down. I'm not saying that to say Yglesias is arguing in bad faith; I mean, instead, that I think he believes something about universal arguments that simply doesn't work. Ironically, the argument I'm about to make might get slotted into an intersectional, post-modern, identity politics one these days, except on impermissible lines.

But let me make an analogy. I have a friendly acquaintance who has a PhD in English. Really clever and funny guy. And, importantly for this story, he's a not especially rabid or antagonistic atheist of Russian Jewish descent. And at some point, a decade ago, we were at a barbeque, and he was talking about the time that he had spent, earlier in his academic career, in a university in northern Utah. Obviously a very homogenous, very LDS part of the country. And at some point, he made some joke in passing about how stiflingly and uncomfortably Mormon the whole place was, but fortunately "we" had managed to get a lot of Supreme Court rulings that were making being that way much less possible in public, "we" were half way there, and "we" just needed another batch of Supreme Court rulings to finish the job and make it possible for "normal" people to move there and not be hassled by the religiously homogenous. I want to say immediately that 1) he said this in a somewhat wry way, and 2) the "we" he was clearly referring to, and that he assumed I was an unobjectionable part of, was "smart, cosmopolitan, well-educated progressives". He didn't have a particular strong atheist or Jewish identity, as far as I could tell (and in the best of progressive Jewish fashion, he married a progressive Catholic woman later).

And on the one hand, I can totally imagine that, for a clever, wry, atheist academic of Russian Jewish extraction from New England, being in homogenous LDS communities would be pretty alienating. And I could totally imagine seeing progress, for such a person, as being synonymous with dampening all possible public expressions of homogenous, assumed religiosity. And from that view point, mass immigration especially, along with progressive public schools and university educations and Hollywood narrative promulgation, are all unabashed goods, creating a more comfortable, more desirable world.

But as a matter of fact, much of my extended family is true believing LDS, some of it out west, and I'm very, very familiar with the LDS stories of their founding, and the religious persecution they faced early on, and the incredible lengths they went to and sacrifices they made to carve out space to live out their own values and their own beliefs. And if the actual criteria for universal progress in America is "to what extent can a wry progressive academic atheist of Russian Jewish extraction move anywhere in the country and always feel comfortable", as far as I'm concerned, that's equivalent to saying, "we all must agree that progress means all sincerely religious people need to accept social changes that functionally amount to a repudiation of the kind of religious tolerance that evolved after the horrors of the 30 Years War. And in practice this will be experienced as something like a soft ethnic cleansing". It is literally meaningless to say you can just be LDS as a matter of silent belief in your head that doesn't get expressed in the world through community behavior. That's the kind of religious tolerance the Bolsheviks and current China support.

And the actual experience of integrating all those Catholic immigrants into American society over the course of the 20th century absolutely did get experienced, in many ways, like a kind of soft ethnic cleansing, or it certainly was by the parent or grandparent generations watching their home cultures and home religions get completely melted away by mass culture, Hollywood, public schools, and later universities. There was a huge amount of legitimate trauma. There's definitely an undercurrent of all of that in my reading about the 60s, the 70s, forced busing, and the white ethnic turn towards the Reagan coalition later. J. Anthony Lukas's "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families" is a great book about a lot of these tensions. Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land" likewise captures some of that sense in rural Tea Party southerners now.

I know I'm kind of focusing more on religion than "ethnicity" here, but to be honest, even going along with a "racism" frame about immigration is already a way of asserting something about why these issues matter that seems, as far as I can tell, audaciously out of step with the actual on-the-ground experiences of why immigration actually ends up so fraught in practice.

Noah Smith recently wrote a tweet that was something about how he had lived in cosmopolitan neighborhoods with lots of diverse immigrants all his life, those neighborhoods were always great and benefited from that, and therefore anyone who had a problem with such neighborhoods was just wrong or ignorant or something.

Franklin Foer a year ago wrote an Atlantic piece (archive version of the original version here: https://archive.is/rzozj) that is really quite interesting titled "The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending", and it covers a lot of interesting ideas, but it does it really good job of fleshing out a much more detailed version of the argument that my PhD friend made, too.

I'm legitimately sorry this post is so Jewish example heavy - those just happen to be the most well-articulated examples I have at hand, and the Foer piece in particular is quite interesting in all sorts of ways - but I do want to emphasize that a lot of the university connected non-Jewish progressives I'm currently around would likely agree with much of these arguments, so I really do think it's a progressive thing.

I know I'm not quite responding to the parent post (especially about the role of changing technology in making assimilation harder), but I think it's actually really important to be much more clear-eyed about the reality of the previous cycle of mass immigration and assimilation. Some of the facts on the ground have changed (broadcast media and Hollywood matter less, social media complicates things, there was a way that intellectual confidence and energy in internationalism was ascendant in that previous era in a way that it clearly isn't now), but it's also definitely the case that much of the retconning about the previous experience of immigration is very... selective... about who has written those stories, and which experiences get captured and recounted.

And the actual experience of integrating all those Catholic immigrants into American society over the course of the 20th century absolutely did get experienced, in many ways, like a kind of soft ethnic cleansing, or it certainly was by the parent or grandparent generations watching their home cultures and home religions get completely melted away by mass culture, Hollywood, public schools, and later universities. There was a huge amount of legitimate trauma.

The Catholic Church In America had a ginormous amount of cultural soft power; thé hayes code was set by bishops as much as anyone else for just one example.

The important thing to note is how much of this soft power was renounced voluntarily. And sûre, maybe it couldn’t have been held on to anyways. But they didn’t really try; the decision to integrate was more or less voluntary.

The decision to integrate coincided with the general decline of religiosity across the western world that followed the 1950s. Only one major Christian movement - American Protestantism - held on long after the others (European Protestantism, Lutheran and other, and Catholicism in general) fell, and that was in large part because of the unique success of the evangelical televangelists and the Christian revival movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, led by extraordinarily capable preachers like Billy Graham and supported by an embrace of modern media and to some extent music. Catholics tried to copy some of this with happy clappy post Vatican II masses and so on, but it never had the same vitality.

The evangelical revival preserved a religious Christian (not social customs; divorce and single parenthood still rose of course) identity among otherwise deracinated American Protestants and the many, many Catholics who converted to it for almost two generations after most Europeans largely abandoned regular churchgoing Christianity. It didn’t really die, not wholly anyway, until the mid-2010s, and even today hangs on due to comparatively higher birth rates and the large scale conversion of Latin American Catholics and their descendants, both in their homelands and in the US.

Catholics didn’t have that, and so a combination of suburbanization due to white flight clearing out the old ethnic neighborhoods and throwing various white ethnics and founding whites together in suburbia and the decline in Catholic mass attendance led to intermarriage and the merging into a shared American identity. Sometimes this is laid at the feet of WW2, but I disagree. The New York or Philadelphia of, for example, 1949 was still very much a place with distinctly separate white ethnic identities. It happened 10-30 years later.

American Catholicism declined following thé decision to relax social controls; obviously post hoc non ergo propter hoc, but also prior hoc ergo non propter hoc.

I certainly agree that the American Catholic Church was not going to maintain its fifties peak. But the looming decline was not in 1965 something that was generally known.

I think honestly it’s because it wasn’t authentic in a sense. They didn’t embrace the happy clappy because they thought it would make better Catholics, they kinda did it to appeal to outsiders.

I'm not necessarily convinced of that. I think attempting to evangelize was part of the motivation, but an even bigger part just seems to be that this is what people liked back then, especially for poorly-catechized mid-century American Catholics who were living through a period where their religion seemed to be changing by the minute in ways that were unprecedented and unexpected. Catholics at the time didn't know how to deal with such radical change, so they defaulted to things that they knew from the outside or felt good to them. Happy clappy songs among them.

Lower-mid level clerics liked it- laypeople didn’t get a say under the old system or in the post Vatican II era. It didn’t matter what they thought either way.

Yeah.

Assimilation is harder just by being constantly exposed to the home culture, let alone the fact that currently, there's almost zero formal pressure to adopt Western Cultural norms, since there's a whole industry of thought devoted to arguing that Western Cultural norms aren't better' and are in fact 'enriched' by adopting competing norms.

I don’t think this is some kind of groundbreaking point but why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument?

A) As you say, they're not as smart as they portray themselves (95% confidence) and these arguments genuinely don't occur to them and they're not going to consider them deeply even if they did.

B) They are indeed propagandists (which goes to the above point, you don't need to be smart to be one, if you can repeat the desired arguments 'convincingly.'), but they're independent propagandists and they're mostly in it for money and a crumb of status.

C) Sloppy arguments work when you are never, ever, ever forced to engage with the other side, or a smart interloper, or even acknowledge the holes in your argument unless someone with a higher status in your tribe points it out... at which point they generally snap into line and adjust their talking points as needed.

THAT right there is my primary objection to "public intellectuals" like Yglesias, Hanania, Noah Smith, they literally never seek out the strongest argument on the other side and attempt to debunk it by engaging with the strongest intellectuals who oppose them.

I watched Alex Nowrasteh get absolutely creamed because he wants to uphold the "Right wing violence is rewarded/celebrated by the right and generally denounced by the left" narrative, THE SAME DAY that the left is venerating the death of a violent lefty.

These are not serious people. They have to engulf their ideas in bubble wrap and display them behind six layers of plexiglass in order to keep them from being shattered by the whisper of an opposing argument.

I can’t help but think repeating a catechism has value to building political unity even (perhaps especially if) it’s fake.

Undoubtedly. That's the part they've monetized. Since a huge number of the audience you're courting is within one standard deviation of the median IQ, you just have to impress those guys to and keep them paying you to have an impact and make a decent living.

So a ~120 can probably impress the 100-110s enough to get them to accept him as 'one of them' and pay a bit of money to hear their preferred opinions blurted back to them with a bit of extra polish and a layer of respectability.

After that point, its just a matter of guarding your market share.

I mean, I’ve met third gen Hispanics in America. ‘Basically Mexican’ they are not. Assimilation totally happens if the immigrants are willing.

I don’t know if Somalis are willing or not.

et me make an analogy. I have a friendly acquaintance who has a PhD in English. Really clever and funny guy. And, importantly for this story, he's a not especially rabid or antagonistic atheist of Russian Jewish descent. And at some point, a decade ago, we were at a barbeque, and he was talking about the time that he had spent, earlier in his academic c

Mexicans are Catholic Christians, with cultures nearly as much descended from European colonialism as the US's. It's not surprising that this is a more permeable barrier, and not surprising that their 3rd generations are similar to your average American with an ambiguously religious background that has melted into secular Americanism.

I don't understand just assuming it will be the same with further cultures.

Here is the Yglesias tweet. Note that this is very specifically a response to a screenshotted Matt Walsh tweet.

The Walsh argument (if you can call it that) is thus:

  • There exists at least one place in the United States (Dearborn) which has a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms.

  • It would be bad if the entire country was majority Muslim and had Islamic cultural norms.

  • Therefore Dearborn Michigan having a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms is bad. (This isn’t explicitly stated, but I think it is strongly implied.)

Matt Yglesias responds to this by pointing out a counterexample; Little Italy 100 years ago had a majority Italian population and Italian cultural norms, and yet this didn’t result in the Italianification of American society.

This is not intended to be a fully general argument in favor of immigration. It is a response to a specific bad argument. If you are already anti-immigration, you probably read Walsh’s argument and fill in the gaps with your own pre-existing cognitive scaffold, but none of that is actually there in the text that Yglesias is responding to.

Problem one: Italy does not believe it exists to spread Italian influence and culture. There are no Italian missionaries spreading the message of Al dente pasta. Islam is a missionary religion with a strong cultural belief in forcing others to adapt to their religion.

I'm trying to be maximally charitable to both Matts, and its a bit weird in application because Yglesias is clearly not being charitable to Walsh. Not that I'd expect him to be, Yglesias is a hack, whereas Walsh is more your standard grifter.

Walsh's argument appears to be "These folks do NOT share critical factors that make for idealized American citizens, and if they don't assimilate, this is clearly going to degrade the shared experience of other Americans in their area and make the country worse for everyone else, on net."

That is, having an entire (local) government run by people who don't share your ideals, and having their ideals prioritized over that of the locals is going to inflict some low level misery on the citizens who were there first, in the best case scenario.

Then Walsh pushes the scare line "if these norms become widespread it'll degrade the entire country from its founding ideals."

Which doesn't have to be an argument that it is going to happen, I interpret it as "imagine it happening to you and consider if you want to allow it to continue."

Same reason we're supposed to empathize with Iryna aruska. No, there's not going to be an epidemic of crazed hoboes stabbing people on public transport. But we should clearly not prefer crazed hoboes stabbing people on public transport as a public policy matter, right?

There is NOTHING in Walsh's post that actually implies that this WILL be America in 50 years.

In contrast, Yglesias is basically implying that Italians assimilated (although its such a spurious comparison for the reason the OP intimated) and it didn't result in America becoming Italian, therefore Muslim enclaves are objectively a good thing if we just let them become Americanized.

Which is great if you believe that American Culture is coherent and pervasive enough to overpower a culture that is much, much larger by geography, population, historical tradition, and, ultimately, successful resistance to assimilation/co-opting by outsiders.

I mean, yes, the local Muslim population is tiny, but would anyone argue they're NOT plugged in to the hundreds of millions of other Muslims throughout the globe?

The smaller irony is that we can look FURTHER back in history to compare what happens when Italians conquer a place vs. when Muslim Arabs conquer a place: the Roman and Ottoman empires, respectively.

As a matter of history, Rome's approach to ruling is quite permissive if the conquered territory kicked back its taxes and was willing to pitch in to defend the place from other powers.

Ottomans were a bit less permissive, up to and including Forced Conversion to Islam.

It turns out that the cultural norms a given nation or people hold dearest has huge implications for how these cultures will propagate and interact with other cultures they encounter, and you can't ignore that when predicting future paths.

(I'm not pushing this forward as a knockdown argument)

In other words, Matt Yglesias' flippant reduction of cultural differences to merely additional food choices is pretty laughable as a response, when the larger point Matt Walsh is making is that there are features of culture that are critical to a nation's cohesion, and cultural differences can include features that make assimilation less likely and co-existence less desirable.

Food choice is an utter Red Herring. Pun sort of intended.

Italians, via proof by demonstration, didn't have those assimilation-resistant features. It does NOT stand to reason that Muslims will thus assimilate too. Indeed, we can see from the example of Orthodox Jews that it is entirely possible to maintain a religious community very much separated from the larger overculture. But of course, Orthodox Jews don't seek to convert others to grow their ranks. Muslims do.

The smaller irony is that we can look FURTHER back in history to compare what happens when Italians conquer a place vs. when Muslim Arabs conquer a place: the Roman and Ottoman empires, respectively.

The Ottoman Turks were not Arabs. Turkish immigration has caused its own interesting set of issues, what with Imam Gulem's network of dodgy charter schools, but they are profoundly different to the ones Arabs cause. Turkish Cypriot immigration to the UK has been trouble-free, though it isn't clear if it has been an economic net positive.

If we are keeping score, the Ottoman Empire was also rather less assiduous than the Romans when it comes to persecuting Christians.

I mean if we're being fully clear, Somalis aren't Arabs either.

But its not a stretch to say they'd identify closer with Muslim Turks, or Muslim Palestinians, than Egyptian Christians. Ilhan Omar is a notable example there.

And my historical knowledge on this point is spotty, but the Ottomans are pretty much the direct proximate cause for the Kingdom of Saud arising as a unified Arab Muslim state (yes, the British intervened, but the region's fate had long been shaped by Ottoman influence by then).

All this to say, we've got historical examples of Italian stock assimilating with competing cultures (although co-existence with Germanics has been spotty), and historical examples of various strains of ethnic Muslims absolutely refusing to assimilate with competing cultures, and then going to war with those cultures at the earliest opportunity.

With the huge gaping counterexample of Indonesia, but I've not learned enough of their history to competently comment.

(That's kinda why I chose to broadly paint "Arab" Muslims as the particular discussion point, since there are a few strains that don't have the fearsome reputation).

The actual Arab conquests were also full of forced conversion to Islam, arabization, etc.

Yep. That was the 'trap' I laid in that argument, if someone objects that Ottomans weren't representative. The other examples are worse. Just look at what the Moors did to Spain. Although Christians ultimately returned that favor.

There's some parallels to be drawn WRT to English/American conquest of various Native American tribes... but you can note that once the victory was secure the Americans permit the tribes to continue to exist and maintain a distinct culture as best they can, which has persisted to this day.

Also these days the world's enough of a monoculture so random food trends and innovations in far-flung lands can be copied without much actual meaningful travel.

My city has a very small Japanese population and nonetheless there's a plethora of popular Japanese restaurants around.

Why does it always come back to food?

No, I don't believe that this is just an idiosyncrasy of Yglesias, or just a fun example that he picked for no real reason. This is a recurring pattern. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard throughout my life "we live in a world with a large diversity of cultures, for example, different people eat different types of food...". Food is the first thing you think of when you think of "culture"? Really? The "we need immigrants for their food" argument is not unique to Yglesias, this is a known talking point.

Just last night I was having a conversation with a woman who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food. It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.

(I mean, frankly I should already know why it always comes back to food: Nietzsche suggested in GoM that a people's philosophical outlook is an epiphenomenon of their dietary choices. Perhaps this is the grug-genius alliance in action, and I am the seething midwit who insists on being unnecessarily contrarian. I dunno man... it just strikes me as an obliviousness of the fact that people even have a psychological or spiritual existence that extends beyond their material means of sustenance.)

Why does it always come back to food?

Its low effort? I think that is it. Its difficult to articulate why Ethiopian culture is a boon to the District of Colombia if one is discussing civics, governance, literature, etc. That requires actual knowledge. Its easy (and in fact every time I visit DC, someone insists I go to their favorite Ethiopian restaurant with them) to throw down $50 for some food. It is similar to how most people who hate the Confederacy or Nazis don't know what Northerners or American Soldiers thought of said regimes in 1864 & 1944 respectively.

Most Westerners won't ever interact with immigrants (or locals when they vacation abroad in poor countries) beyond a context of low-level service industries so food is the obvious thing to associate with them. It is also in the interest of the immigrant groups to hype their cuisine since ethnic restaurant industry is very common way to earn good money if you have no capital/know-how/education that is valid in the new country.

You might also hear from some less educated wanna-be liberal Westerners that "<immigrant_group> works hard and is good at <construction/farm labour/cleaning/etc>" as a praise. But this line of thinking will feel dangerous to higher-mind people as they will recognize they are praising brown people's propensity for mindless drudgery, or at worst a modern system of quasi-slavery quite often.

And almost everything else about any poor immigrant group's culture beyond ethnic food and cheap labour (and maybe fun weddings) will feel very icky to average Westerner so they would rather not think about it beyond any extremely sanitized context like Buddha statues and yoga studios.

Can I ask where you live and your cultural background? Food is perhaps the great cultural ambassador while simultaneously many Americans are divorced from food as culture. This is why veganism and Soylent can both thrive here. Imagine trying to integrate either one into family meals with three generations at the table. Nonna/yiayia/abuela poors everyone a glass? Soylent is not just a replacement for food, but for the meal itself. This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.

Many Americans in my experience also lack awareness of food as culture or that they are missing something (exactly like the people who are blind but don’t know it, and whose family doesn’t know it either). See the Midwest at large, and to a lesser extent, generic white people elsewhere.

It makes sense to me that we first consider food as culture, particularly amongst the coastal liberals, who have already personally abandoned religion en bloc - we can’t say much about the culture salience of something that is at best, invisible to them. What other lens would they use at that point?

Can I ask where you live and your cultural background?

I live in America and I like anime.

This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.

Can a meal -- particularly a certain type of meal, repeated by custom on a certain schedule, with the appropriate pomp and circumstance, etc -- be imbued with deep ritualistic significance? Indubitably. But then, it's not just the literal food that acts as the "bearer" of culture alone in this case, but the body of ritual surrounding it, and the network of social and historical relations that that ritual exists in.

Immigrants coming to the US to sell their wares like any other fungible anonymized commodity on the free market would then represent the destruction of culture rather than its continuance, because the network of human relations that constituted the actual center of culture has been obviated. (At the very least, people who think that eating lasagna is the same thing as "experiencing another culture" are actually doing nothing of the sort.)

What other lens would they use at that point?

See here.

I agree with you, it's a recurring pattern. Partly just because of the convenience of food. You don't need to learn a foreign language or study its history to understand it, hell these days you don't have to leave your house. You can get ethnic food delivered to your door, and stuff it down your throat without a thought. It's easy and fun to try different foods that way, but also considered hip and high-status to try lots of exotic ethnic foods, the more exotic the better.

It takes a lot more effort to engage with other parts of foreign culture. Listening to something like Indian sitar music or Mongolian throat singing, and it probably sounds weird and boring to most of us who didn't grow up with it. Much easier to listen to something like Kpop which is engineered to sound exactly like Western pop music, even including some English phrases and Western-style clothes. It's even harder to sit on a multi-hour foreign religious service. I've tried that (for Buddhism and Mexican catholicism) and found myself thinking "wtf am I doing here..." I imagine it would be even worse for someone who's less open-minded than me and believes strongly in their own religion.

What I enjoy the most is to actually spend time with people from foreign cultures, talking to them in depth in real life, and really getting to know them. It's fascinating! But I rarely get the chance to do that even when I'm travelling- people are busy, there's the language barrier, and many people just don't want to open up about their life that much. A lot of Westerners now have sort of learned that it's impolite to talk about certain topics, so they just kind of run away from talking about them. Once I read an interview with a student from an African country studying at an American college, and she said it threw her off how little anyone wanted to talk about her country. She was expecting all sorts of curious questions, but everyone was either not interested or afraid of being offensive, so it left her with little to talk about. That made me sad.

But there's also the darker part. When you really learn about foreign cultures, it's not all tasty food and fun dances. In fact, most of it isn't. You don't have to dig much before you encounter something that makes you think "wow, that's awful." Well, awful by my standards, but of course there's lot of stuff in my American culture that they think is awful so.... we just have to live and let live. I can tolerate their extreme religion fanatacism if they can tolerate our incessant and disgusting advertising. Different cultures will also often have views way outside the Western mainstream norm on things like feminism, democracy, human rights, education, sexuality, or even just what foods are clean enough to eat.

For example: I've spent a lot of time in Seoul, and it always makes me laugh how awkward the tourism is there for western tourists. They come in expecting this fantasy land they saw in Kdramas and Kpop videos. They want to experience "traditional Korean culture," but in a way that makes for a cute instagram story. They're not prepared for stuff like:

  • using corporal punishment to teach children
  • expecting kids to study 12+ hours a day (or workers to work the same amount)
  • eating chicken feet, dog meat, or any kind of organ meat
  • prostitution
  • absolute obediance to family elders or anyone above you in the workplace heirarchy
  • really blatant homophobic jokes
  • casually telling women "you look fat," and encouraging them to get cosmetic surgery
  • old men drinking vast quantities of hard liquor, sometimes even outside
  • going deep into debt to buy designer clothes so that you look acceptable
  • mandatory cash payments to any friend or family member getting married

All of that is culture too! you take the bad with the good. But that's intolerable for most western tourists. Much more comfortable to just eat some rice and grilled meat, take a picture of yourself wearing a colorful robe at the palace, buy a fan, and let the culture stop there.

eating chicken feet, dog meat, or any kind of organ meat

I'm not really surprised about the other things, but I've heard from many sources the dog thing is rather exaggerated and not that common or culturally entrenched. I mean, for me it's like one of the most known memes about Koreans but I always thought it's being quite far from the actual situation. Have I been wrong?

yeah like the other guy said, it's not really something you'd see as a tourist, and it's not at all common for younger generations, but used to be common for older generations. Apparently it was just banned last year, but I have no idea how effective that ban is. I'll be the countryside still has places for it.

According to a 2020 survey of South Koreans, 83.8% of respondents reported to never having consumed dog meat before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat_consumption_in_South_Korea

It was more common several decades ago, but it's in decline. The people who have eaten it before are of the older generation, and most of them do not consume it regularly.

If you're talking to a Korean online (especially in English), they probably have never eaten dog before.

It’s the only basic, physiological need which has room for variety.

Since the Industrial Revolution, clothing has gotten into that territory, and since the Sexual Revolution…well.

But food has a head start measured in millennia.

who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food.

If I can rant for a second I'm going to say this person has utterly terrible taste, or more likely it is a skill issue - it's easy to end up at terrible tourist only places and order American Italian dishes instead of actual Italian food.

It is also possible to order Italian staples in the wrong regions and get mediocre food. Ordering pizza in Rome or carbonara in Bologna is like ordering a well-done steak in Paris - it's a signal to the kitchen that you don't care about food quality.

What do you order in those two regions?

In Rome, you order pasta rather than pizza. The local specialities are arabiata, amatriciana, carbonara, and giricia.

In Bologna, the local pasta dishes are the heavier, meatier ones, with ragu the most famous (known outside Bologna as spaghetti bolognese). Bologna is also the spiritual home of filled pasta dishes like tortellini and ravioli.

Luckily, it's the modern era now, and Italy has modern infrastructure. You can get pizza in Rome now, or risotto in Bologna, or really whatever you want in any major city. You can even get (gasp) non-Italian food! And sometimes (double gasp) it's actually better, because the local specialty places are just as likely to be cutting corners to save money.

But of course that's not what tourists want. They want to go to a very specific area, eat a very specific thing that got invented there 500 years ago, take a picture of themselves eating in front of a romantic backdrop, and then brag to there friends that it was just so much better than what you'd get back home, even if the restaurant back home is cooking the exact same food with better equipment and higher quality ingrediants. They'd lose massive hipster cred if they were seen eating the "wrong" food in Italy, even if they were eating it with actual Italian locals because locals also like to eat a variety of foods and they're not going to eat spaghetti bolognese every single day. They can appreciate a good kebab or chicken tikka massala just as much as anyone.

I'd say that food is a massive and very important aspect of culture. Its behind language in importance. But maybe as important as religion. Definitely more important than holidays (since many holidays are heavily defined by religion and food).

You eat food every day. You share meals with family and the people you like most in the world. Food can lock in memories, and eating it again can bring back those memories. Its one area where attempts to relentlessly optimize everything enjoyable and unique out of life have mostly failed (meal replacement options were only ever popular in small enclaves of weird programmers and rationalist). Food is one the first ways people like to meet their romantic partners. Food is how we celebrate.

Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?

Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?

Off the top of my head: attitudes and practices surrounding religion, childbearing (are you encouraged to even have kids at all, or at you an antinatalist?), cohabitation with immediate family and/or extended family, career choice (are you encouraged to stick with the family business, or do you have an individualist culture where "doing your own thing" is an aspiration?), different types of long-term planning (are you a square if you refuse to blow your paycheck right away, or are you an idiot if you do blow it?), respect towards elders and superiors (how unthinkable would it be to challenge your boss's ideas during a meeting?), freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression, sexual ethics, etc.

To be clear, there is no "lived experience of a culture" for a tourist on a one week vacation, that's an absurdity. The "lived experience of a culture" can only unfold over a lifetime. A culture is a concrete mode of life, as distinguished from other possible concrete modes of life.

Food is not culture. Foot binding, widow burning, jus primae noctis -- that's culture. To the extent that we increasingly find genuine cultural difference to be unimaginable, this is only a statement about the shrinking horizon of our imagination, and not a statement about the nature of culture.

We just fundamentally disagree here. I don't see any path to reconciliation. I didn't realize there was such a large disconnect on the meaning and essence of culture.

But this is also a values disconnect. It's subjective.

It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.

Oh! Now I understand why no one likes the English.

Harder to be obese when our food is so terrible

And yet we manage!

People love to rag on English food, but I don't really think that's fair. Any culture that comes up with a dish as great as fish and chips deserves respect.

...it's literally just breaded fish with French fries. How can one claim credit for coming up with that?

... Because they did come up with it? I'm not seeing the problem.

White fish + white flour + white potatoes, all cooked in neutral flavour vegetable oil. If anything warrants the reputation for bland beige British food it's fish and chips. It's not even cheap, it's practically the same price as a takeaway chicken curry with rice.

Who cares? It's absolutely delicious, one of the all-time great dishes. I don't give a damn about the color.

Also pies (pork / game / steak & ale etc.), bangers and mash, bubble and squeak, toad in the hole, Shepherd's / Cottage Pie (not a pie despite the name), Lancashire hot-pot, sticky toffee pudding, plum/Christmas pudding, Victoria sponge cake, Eton Mess, chutneys, marmalades, roast pheasant, the Full English, the Sunday Roast...

English food had a dip because of the wars and the temporary loss of food culture, but more than that it's suffered terribly from central heating & reduced global exercise resulting in a drive for low-calorie food.

There is also an earlier dip because we urbanised before the development of refrigeration, meaning that there were a lot of people with very limited access to fresh food. The other country of which this is true is Belgium, which is not coincidentally the other country whose cuisine is a joke and whose signature dish is cheap seafood and chips.

Fair, it's not just fish and chips. That is the one that comes to mind most readily for me (probably because I'm from the Midwest and we love fried fish there), but the Brits have given us other good food as well.

Not complaining, just appending! I want British food to be more generally known, I think there's a lot to offer. We just need to find a format that works.

A friend noted that English food would have been eaten much more communally in the old days, buffet / feast style - it was much easier to do portion control when you had a table full of pies and hams and cakes and things and you just took a little of each and the rest went back for the next day.

There are actually plenty of widely beloved British dishes, they’re just so widely adopted that they’re not considered uniquely English by most people(world spanning empire will do that to you) so distinctively British dishes are things like beans on toast, mushy peas, and warm beer.

Always found it hilarious that they explored and conquered the entire globe in the hunt for spices then used exactly NONE of said spices in the food.

We traded the spices to pay for tea and sugar. Priorities!

I can't believe this Reddit tier joke has made it to a motte thread. Aside from being a decade old and barely funny the first time, it's not even accurate.

Balti, Chicken Tikka Masala, Vindaloo. No spices in British food, no sir.

[For Americans not aware of the history, all of these dishes originated in the UK and are largely consumed by white British people]

Vindaloo

Portuguese, is it not?

My tongue is mostly in cheek when I say this, but those items are generally not on the menu when I venture into an English Pub (here in America, to be clear).

Also Irish food is quite tasty, maybe owing to the need to get extremely creative when potatoes make up 80% of the diet, so I do respect UK food if we include that as well.

As with teetotaler drug dealers, gay fashion designers or eunuch harem overseers, it can be advantageous to be immune to the temptations of your own supply.

I'm imagining a Captain on a British East India Company ship catching a crew member shaking a spoonful of nutmeg onto his rations and looking on in indignant disapproval as he orders 5 lashes. "Hands off the product, lads."

It is likely harder to assimilate in the modern world where immigrant populations are not cut off as opposed to the old world. So pointing to historic examples of assimilation do not hold for today because the factors have changed.

This is exactly right. During the early 1900s the fertility rate of the population in USA was around 3.5 children per woman. At the same time there were around 13.5 million immigrants living in the USA out of the population of 92 million, so approximately 14%. The birth rate was over 30 per 1,000 population or around 2,7 million a year. So the total population of immigrants in USA after spurt in late 1800s and early 1900s was equivalent of 5 years of births. And even then it stretched the resources eventually leading to Immigration Act of 1924 limiting the immigration, the 1910 was actually the peak year of immigration share which fell down to 5% in 1970. In 2025 the total population of immigrants is around 50 million - or around 16% out of 340 million - with 3,6 million births in 2024. So we are talking about 14 years of natural births in the nation.

Additionally early 20th century was magical for USA as it was the era of birth of mass media especially radio and television at the tail end of successfully finishing the Manifest Destiny project. Also US won two world wars and the nation swam in prestige and patriotic fervor, which massively helped with US ethnogenesis as we see it now. I'd say that capacity of the nation to accept immigration is regulated by proportion of immigrants compared to natural replacement of domestic people paired with the ability to project cultural dominance and assimilate these foreign immigrants. The interesting thing about progressive policies is that they are actively working against both, but definitely against the assimilation with their multi-culti salad bowl ideology.

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