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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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