This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
First of all, having no or very controlled family reunification and discerning permanent residency and citizenship does not preclude getting geniuses. Singapore, which, if it weren't well run, would be a much worse place to migrate to than the US, manages to attract very good people just fine.
Secondly, while I admire what Jensen Huang built to an extent, it's not trivially true that in his absence there wouldn't be an equal or marginally worse Nvidia equivalent. Indeed, many GPU manufacturers exist and it does not follow that a more restrictionist US would not be at the technological frontier.
Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror. Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.
Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.
If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.
Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.
Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.
Western countries didn't exactly vote against mass immigration either, until well into the 2010s. There is a very noisy anti-immigration movement going back to Enoch Powell in the UK and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and it has real mass working class support, but it doesn't actually move votes.
Even now, anti-immigration populist parties seem to face a hard cap of 25-30% support and centre-right parties who go into coalitions with them are punished - in other words about 70% of the voters are opposed to anti-immigration populism. (Trump wins because the US system allows you to capture the Presidency with 26% of the vote by winning a close primary and then a close general - in a jungle primary he would get 25-30%).
The British far right and populist right are an electoral irrelevance until UKIP get 16% of the vote in a low-turnout European election in 2004, and the first time a party running to the right of the Tories gets a significant vote share in a general election is 2015 when UKIP get 12.6%. The Tories run an anti-immigration campaign in 2005 (with the slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" and it goes down like a lead balloon. David Cameron includes a pledge to cut immigration to the tens of thousands in the 2010 and 2015 manifestos, but the voters (correctly) don't believe him, he wins anyway, and doesn't cut immigration. Boris gets a landslide in 2019 despite having published policies that imply he will do a Boriswave.
The lack of ballot-box support for an anti-immigration insurgent party is unlikely to be purely because FPTP suppresses it - other third parties get mass support during this period, with the SDP-Liberal Alliance peaking at 25.4% in 1983 and the Greens getting 15% in the 1989 European elections.
So the big picture in the UK is that the Tories don't need an anti-immigration message to win, which is good because they can't effectively use one. And there is no meaningful opposition to their right until Farage, and even Farage doesn't have enough votes to matter until 2024 - his impact on British politics between 2010 and 2024 is driven by the impact of Farage panic on the internal politics of the Conservative Party.
In France, you have a serious anti-immigration party opposing the Gaullists from the right going back to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in the 1980's, but it's stuck on about 15% of the vote (with very little chance of winning anything under the French electoral system, because the other 85% will hold their noses and vote for anyone-but-FN in the runoff) until Marine Le Pen's 2017 breakthrough.
In the US, socially conservative insurgents (who, among other things, oppose immigration) consistently get about 20% in Republican primaries until Trump. The GOP grassroots are obviously more anti-immigrant than this suggests, but when they get into the polling booth they pull the lever for a GOPe tax cutter.
What does all this mean - the simplest interpretation is that immigration is low salience for normies until well into the 2010s. Talking about the issue (in either direction) is a vote loser even among anti-immigration conservative voters because it implies you don't care enough about the bread-and-butter issues voters care about. The other point is that effective anti-immigration politics is very visibly tied to the failure of traditional centre-left and centre-right parties to offer a positive programme voters could vote for. The best example here is the French Presidential election in 2017, where the traditional two big parties came third and fifth, but you see the same thing happening in the UK (where Boris can only win in 2019 by running against his own party's record in government) and the US (where neither the GOPe nor the Democrats can manage run a replacement-level candidate against Trump).
So the interesting question is the direction of causation. Do centre-left and centre-right parties decline because the public finally means it when they say they are fed up with mass immigration, or does anti-immigration politics exploit a vacuum left by the decline of centre-left and centre-right parties for other reasons? Those other reasons are obvious - some combination of social media-driven negativity and very real policy failures including the 2008 financial crisis and Iraq, with the relative impact depending on how sympathetic you find the old-school politicians.
And? If the idea is that our rulers get to do whatever they want, even if their constituents are against it because "neener neener, you didn't vote hard enough" (even when they clearly did - see the policies under the "fascist" governments of Italy, Poland, or the recent DIGNIDAD Act), then it's time to stop pretending "democracy" as a concept has any substance to it at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like there might be a breadcrumbs effect that is under-explored. Basically, every ultra-competent (in the sense of being simultaneously highly intelligent and highly conscientious and highly agentic, and so on) person in the world, if they are interested in leaving their country and going to the west, will try to get into the US first and foremost, since it's the powerhouse #1. And since they are ultra-competent, they will find a way in. Every single other western country - no matter how hard they're working to have selective immigration - will only get the breadcrumbs from this, only people who either aren't quite competent enough to get into the US or who want to go to another country for idiosyncratic reasons, like already having family present there. And worse, this effect is cascading down: If not the US, then it's north-western europe, which also isn't even terribly hard to get into for a reasonably motivated individual.
To be sure as long as you're not screwing up the selection you're still getting reasonably competent, unproblematic individuals. But I wouldn't be surprised if Australia in particular gets the chaff of the grinders: Those that needed to grind extra-hard just to barely make it.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah I'm not a particular Elon Musk fan and I think he's probably better example of somebody who's harder to replace in that he has the right combination of luck, willingness to keep diversifying into new speculative fields and raw tenacity to actually engender meaningful change as an individual. IMO somebody like Huang would have likely emerged regardless since it's not like he invented Unobtanium that completely unlocked the path of GPU development.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link