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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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What were you envisioning? A world of huge masses of people just move around freely and frictionlessly? Because that’s what requires massive state intervention to accomplish.

Not "frictionlessly," but at least with respect to particular, rich, hard-to-legally-immigrate-to countries like the united states much less friction-full than currently. Of course, the overall makeup of immigrants would change, in ways I think both of us would find positive-- more hardworking mexicans, fewer lazy venezuelans*, for example. But I predict more immigration than we have now.

I’m pretty sure I used the word State as my hate object, which is a kind of government but not synonymous with government in general

I guess we're using these words in different ways, here. I would agree that not all governments are states, but would say that any organized monopoly on violence is at least state-like, becoming more stateful the more organized and monopolistic it is. In particular, you imagined your mutual aid group being denied because of state-enforced ethnic heterogenity. But having community-enforced ethnic homogenity just transfers the "stateness", rather than destroying it. Being maximally charitable, you're imaging a case where the mutual-aid ethnic community doesn't exclude outsiders, but merely declines to offer them aid-- and yet, the very enforcement of the property rights required to keep that mutual aid mutual instead of being expropriated has what I would call the essential character of a state.

That is, I think, our essential disagreement here-- how we're using the words "state" and "government" and the lens through which we're analyzing the behavior and advantages/disadvantages of each. We also have some factual disagreements about e.g. immigration but I think they're noncentral to what we're spending a lot of ink discussing. Basically, you have a definition of these words such that the question,

We’re just stuck here, asking ourselves “Who will take care of me, if not the State?”

..is non-tautological. But to a first degree of approximation, I believe any group of people taking care of you is more-or-less "The State" in the first place. To greater or lesser degrees, obviously... It's useful to analyze the ways in which a religious community, school, or job become state-ish to enforce their delegated monopolies on particular varieties of violence, but I wouldn't confuse them with getting put in jail for failing to pay taxes or losing fingers for failing to pay protection money. I would, however, confuse a city or (american federal) state that is an "anti-sanctuary" for the State if they prevented anti-anti-sanctuaries within their borders. Therefore, taken on its face, an argument for always devolving power from the state generalizes recursively to any sub-sub-sub-(etc)-community. I don't think that's the argument you're actually making, and I don't want to argue against a strawman. At the same time, I think the strong form of the anti-state vibe you're suggesting is wrong but can't pick out exactly what qualities/levels of a government/state you're criticizing so I can argue against them.

or to have a community that’s all Catholic by law

That would be based, actually, depending on what exactly, "by law" means. If it means we prevent non-catholics from joining, it would be cringe. But if it meant mandatory indoctrination I would be very happy. Aside from the economic benefits, I'm pro-immigration not despite, but because I think some cultures are better than others. It's the god-given duty of enlightened peoples to convert the backwards and spiritually destitute. For that reason, I don't flinch from the ideological necessity of imposing and enforcing a state. Consequently, I blame the people that compose the State for having values that are bad-- but don't blame them for imposing those values to the best of their ability to do so.