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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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France and Germany have crushing social welfare ponzi schemes that require an ever increasing number of young people. They need immigrants.

Denmark has pretty conclusively proven that MENA migrants are a net drain on the state, not a benefit. Sure there are a few winners: slumlords, the migrant industrial complex, and people who own shares in the discount retail sector.

Idk why European countries pretend the option is undereducated MENA immigrants vs nothing.

There's at least 3 billion people who would love to live in their countries. Surely there has to be a better way to sample from this population.

Every country on the planet wants rich, intelligent, very high skilled immigrants, but there just aren't that many of them available, and they have the entire world in terms of options.

Also, a lot of the political class literally can't tell the difference between good immigrants and bad immigrants. The Conservative government in the UK noticed that Indians and Nigerians in the UK earned lots of money, so they opened the doors to India and Nigeria, missing out the fact that the reason for these immigrant groups' overperformance was the selectivity of the immigration process. They invited so many that the average wages of Indians and Nigerians in the UK went from above the UK average to below the UK average.

They are so shackled by their blank slatism and fear of racism. Pro immigration in the year of our lord 2025 is the idea that genes and culture don’t matter.

Lack of executive function, as I also claim in my other comment.

The exact mechanism by which the executive function is lost is that both the "immigrants good" faction and the "immigrants bad" faction see their optimal marginal strategy as drumming up alignment with the simple and straightforward sentiments I labelled them by. A position like "more smart prosocial immigrants, but fewer stupid violent ones" will be ejected by the former camp because the "fewer" part just diluted and muddles immigrants-good sentiment; likewise, the latter camp will eject it for the "more" part having the same effect on immigrants-bad sentiment.

A position like "more smart prosocial immigrants, but fewer stupid violent ones" will be ejected by the former camp because the "fewer" part just diluted and muddles immigrants-good sentiment; likewise, the latter camp will eject it for the "more" part having the same effect on immigrants-bad sentiment

Executive function doesn't enter into it. The issue is that the two tribes have no reason to trust each other, and that there are too many people with the "accept compromise, but keep fighting" mentality, so the only rational strategy is to swing the status quo as extremely to your side as possible (even beyond what you might actually want), and then fortify it as best as you can.

I consider the ability to execute and maintain complex compromises to be part of what is the "executive function" of society as a compound organism, by analogy with the executive function of an individual.

I guess I'm not sure we're much of a compound organism anymore.

Selection systems work for the initial cohort, but family reunification policies dilute them. If you want durable intergenerational outcomes and want to avoid regression toward the mean of the origin population, you need selection criteria applied more consistently across visa categories, not just to primary applicants but to the broader family migration that follows.

Why have family reunification policies at all ? Individual, wife and child. That's it. Older parents should be able to get a visa as dependents, but never citizenship or social benefits.

Family chain migration is an exploit. Policy wise, it's an easy loophole to close. Politically, may be another issue altogether.

Does the wife have to qualify on her own or does she get in because the husband does?

Lots of successful men have stupid children because they selected their wives for reasons they may live to regret.