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 -
It doesn't though? We have the stats from the Netherlands, non-Western, non-East Asian migrants are usually net losses in tax, they comprise the bulk of the migrant pool. Mass immigration is expensive!
The US will hoover up the high-quality immigrants with their high wages, why would anyone highly skilled want to go to cold, dark, high-tax Sweden? The most compelling reasons are attractive Swedish women and welfare - neither of which are good for Sweden.
Furthermore, adding more labour disincentivizes mechanization and robotization, lowers wages and productivity.
The economic arguments for mass immigration don't make sense. Increasing the total size of the economy doesn't benefit natives, only raising productivity can do that. Sweden is already a very high productivity area with higher STEM Nobels per capita than the United States! Swedes make jet fighters, machine tools, video games like Minecraft: very capable people.
High-quality immigrants are rare and hard to distinguish from cheats. Low-quality migrants can do food delivery, meat processing and Uber, prime targets for automation. And all immigration imposes further pressure on public services and infrastructure, which is invariably expensive to build out in modern Western country.
Mass migration proponents, besides some libertarians, are not motivated primarily by economics at heart IMO. It's a transformational/aspirational/teleological project, it's about getting rid of racism by abolishing distinction. I had one come up to me and tell me this at one point impromptu about how he hoped everyone would interbreed and then we'd all be brown.
I mean I live in a middle-income country (Malaysia) where approximately 5-10% (2 Millionish people) of the population is illegal immigrant workers from the absolute bottom of the global economy (Indonesia, Bangladesh mainly) and they receive no social benefits plus very enthusiastic deportation efforts. Acquiring citizenship in Malaysia as a foreigner is essentially impossible, with approximately 100 granted a year and generally only for stuff like being a National-Level Athlete. They're doing this for pursuit of bottom-end minimum wageish jobs in an economy that has roughly a 15k GDP per capita. The vast majority of 'If we don't let the temporary workers bring in their extended family and have a citizenship pathway, they won't come here' in the West is absolutely ridiculous. The Gulf Arabs have a ridiculous amount of Filipinos and Subcontinentals who they barely even treat as human, the current carrot that Western governments assume they need is about 500 times larger than it needs to be.
As far as I'm concerned most Western economies could easily figure out a scalable dorm system, add temporary working visas at about minimum wage for their countries (and maybe a distant offer for PR if you've been there 20 years and cured cancer like Singapore and Dubai do) and have unlimited resourcing for unskilled and low-skilled work. Meanwhile a bunch of Western countries are trying to run some variant of 'Bring in unskilled labor to do care work for 5 years, then grant PR, then let them bring in 10 family members' which fails to even tread water.
Yep. Illegal guatemalan workers in the US don't expect citizenship(they think that if they have retirement savings they'll enjoy them in... Guatemala, whether or not that's true). They work crappy jobs for the higher wages compared to their home countries, not because they expect to bring their families up here(some of them do, but it isn't the draw).
Birthright citizenship makes it easier for poor Hispanics to get a foothold, though. Plus complicates the process of deportation
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, America really likes "bring my your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to be free", and hates sending crying mothers away. A bunch of Americans are actually sad every time someone is visibly deported. Which isn't sustainable when there are billions of huddled masses and they'd overwhelm the country, but many Americans are in denial about that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with a lot of this, but the above sentence is incorrect.
There are increasing returns to scale in an economy. It's a large (hah) reason why the US and China are as successful as they are. It's a reason why the EU exists, etc.
I half agree. The US and China enjoy huge swathes of high quality land though, whereas Sweden's hopes for land empire ended at Poltava.
If Sweden could somehow find a few million more Swedes I think that would increase the standard of living and national power. More cultural output by one's countrymen is a good thing. But there is no such reserve of Swedes ready to move to Sweden. There are only a small number of Germans, Brits who'd move to Sweden. But an enormous number of Syrians, Somalians who'd like to head for Sweden.
Suppose the US annexed Mexico peacefully, somehow. In returns-to-scale theory it ought to make America a lot stronger. The US gets a whole country's worth of land + all these people, so it's better than just immigration!
In practice I'd expect immense political strife, immense problems with crime, populist socialists to be in the permanent ascendency, massive racial conflict. GDP would go up about 10% but that wouldn't really matter. American-Americans would see a massive rise in the deficit from all the transfer payments, social security imploding like a dying star, dizzying demographic change in their communities...
The core of US strength and prosperity is the highly capable people that produce the innovation and wealth. There aren't so many of them in Mexico. Not to mention that a lot of Mexicans hate the US, their national identity is defined by opposition to the US to a certain extent, given the history of US-Mexican wars.
I think mass immigration is more analogous to annexing Mexico than smooth growth in the economy unlocking economies of scale and market size. All the other complicated demographic factors predominate. Few things are worse for the economy than internal strife. Even the risk should be avoided. While the gains are marginal. Is Canada or Britain gaining much from mass migration economically? Australia's importing many more people than the US proportionately and is in the doldrums for growth.
Mexico is experiencing huge economic growth and latin countries in practice tend to cycle between electing mano dura rightist tough on crime populists and pro-indigenous semiwoke quasisocialists(they're a lot wooier than the US version)... a lot like the USA is shaping up to start doing. The difference is that Mexico under US administration could plausibly carry out a mano dura crackdown on cartel violence in a way the Mexican authorities are incapable of.
Per the World Bank, Mexican growth is mediocre at best:
The US was growing at about 2.5% over the last 30 years from a much higher baseline.
US administration isn't sufficient to squelch the open-air drug markets in major cities, nor the teen takeovers or gang violence already on US soil. Surely it would be easier to clean up St Louis, Memphis and Washington DC of all places than Colima or Tijuana.
US governance is overburdened already, it really doesn't need 140 million new people to administer. Who would want to go in and deal with cartels on their home turf, what trustworthy American would want to live down there?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are so many wrong things here that I don't even know where to start.
The climate is milder than much of the north of the US, but Boston and the PNW are not exactly unpopular.
Lower tax than most other places in Western Europe, surprisingly.
...also comparing unfavourably to much of the rest of Europe. The medical system is every bit as much of a wreck as the British NHS, and unemployment insurance is anemic and opt-in.
Consensus among foreigners (spent several years working there) was that Swedish women are very mediocre, and it's actually the men who tend to be much more attractive than those elsewhere. That meshes well with the preexisting native culture warring about Swedish men taking Thai wives.
This seems to be based on the human intellectual arrogance based view that got thoroughly demolished in the last few years. The best estimate to make now is that research/writing/office work/management/anything white-collar are the prime targets for automation, and food delivery, meat processing and Uber are going to be the last human holdouts because meat has a competitive advantage at navigating the mess that is the 3D world. We got AI solving big open problems in maths before we got self-driving cars that can cope with a Swedish city (as opposed to a handful of American easy-mode desert town street grids).
Sweden is cold. Anywhere that has boilers in houses is cold. Winters with average temperatures around freezing are cold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue
Sweden is 10th in the world in tax revenue as % of GDP, behind the UK, Norway and Denmark. Sweden is high tax!
Swedish welfare spending is indeed lower than much of Europe. However it is still gigantic compared to the welfare spending in third world countries.
Consider also the beauty of Swedish women to say, Guatemalans. Or Bangladeshi women. Or Tanzanian women.
I think you're looking at Sweden from an insanely skewed perspective.
There are robots doing food delivery in Moscow right now. Furthermore, raising the price of these roles by restricting immigration accelerates automation.
Are AI/robotics companies going to try and disrupt an $8 per hour labour meat-processing industry or focus more on the $50-60+ software industry? Price signals guide automation, alongside the actual structural difficulties of course. Cutting up meat is really not that hard but we've adopted this insane economic system where cheap, low-productivity labour is subsidized by the taxpayer in pensions, progressive taxation, social services.
Quibble, but the World Bank figures on the left-hand-side of that table are worthless, because they exclude state and local taxes, and taxes labelled as "social security contributions" or similar. Using the more accurate UN figures on the right-hand-side (which still look too low when eyeballed), Sweden is 4th, and the UK at 20th is in the middle of the pack of first-world countries. The Nordic countries and France have very high taxes, even by Euroleftie standards. I'm not sure what is going on with New Zealand.
The UK shows up as very high tax on the World Bank table because essentially 100% of our taxes are collected by central government.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, pains me to say this but in 2 years time a qualified plumber may well be worth more to countries for immigration purposes than a senior staff level engineer at Google.
Honestly meat processing needs to be paid much much more than it is at the moment. It's a very "dirty" job that still requires a decent amount of knowledge and skill (do you know your beef cuts? I don't know my beef cuts...) and the people doing it and suffering aren't any less human than middle manager Becky in HR with her mediorce degree and unmemorable experience managing a team of 4 people.
If this means Becky from HR gets to eat steak at a restaurant less often then so be it.
From my memories of paying to get deer processed(granted, it's been a few years, I've DIY'd 100% since the pandemic), labor in the packing plant is a relatively minor contribution- I remember it still being a third to half of the price as buying beef in the grocery store.
Not saying raising meatpacking wages won't raise prices. But probably less than you'd think- the price of the animal dominates the price of the meat in the store, not the price of the labor to process it(further evidence- the cheapest meat comes from chickens, then pigs, then cows. For economy of scale reasons, you should expect labor to be lowest per unit of meat on a cow and highest on a chicken).
Chickens a lot less skill and effort involved in butchering, though? Far more whole chickens get sold then whole cows
Turkeys are easier than deer, but on an effort per unit of meat basis I tend to get a much better return from deer. Not a perfect analogy for chicken/beef, but it does point to economy of scale being a bigger deal than effort per animal. The parolees at the kill side of the slaughterhouse can probably produce more pounds of beef per hour, even if it comes from fewer animals.
FWIW my experience of at-home butchery is that pigs give the most meat poundage per hour invested, then lambs/sheep, then deer, then pigeons, then fowl. No doubt that the slaughterhouse has some technology and automation to make this less stark, but I'd still expect economy of scale to wash it out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Such a weird thing to fetishize, as if brown people aren't racist against each other and everyone else. Ask a Mexican about Guatemalans, FFS.
If we're going to have racism, it should at least be refined competitive racism based on nation and beer preferences and clothing, not casual "darker skin bad" racism.
Racism based on beer preferences has the advantage that we can make Bud Light the n****r of beers and put normie Americans on the bottom of the racial hierarchy for once.
Normie Americans don't drink bud light. The most popular beer in America is actually Modelo.
I've got some news for you about the average American of beer-drinking age...
America is 60% white and older Americans are whiter on average. The 12 pack a day Hispanics drink bud(because it’s cheap). Among minors whites and Hispanics are of roughly equal numbers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you know of even one person in the world who is racist strictly on skin tone? Nobody hates melanin, man.
A week ago I saw a domestic worker from the Philippines and a domestic worker from Indonesia aggressively arguing that the other was darker complexioned and that that was a bad thing. Both of these women were very dark by Western standards
More options
Context Copy link
There's a reason the South Koreans have the best sunscreen tech in the world and to be very clear that reason is racism / colorism
More options
Context Copy link
Congratulations to your big beautiful bubble shielding you from the global majority.
Prejudice due to skin color alone is normal in most of the world, especially in dark complexioned countries where no one heard about bell curves.
Search for "colorism" and be enlightened/horrified.
There is a reason why there is, in the third world, huge market for various skin whitening substances, no matter how dubious.
I do not find the rest of the world being morally and intellectually degenerate to be a compelling reason to adopt their ways.
No one is calling you to adopt thirld world ways.
The widespread colorism shows that despite all fears, it is brown skin that is doomed, not white one.
Once embryo gene editing becomes cheap enough to be embraced by Latino, African and Indian masses, everyone picks genes for white skin.
World of the future is beautiful White world from pole to pole, dream of William Luther Pierce will come true (not exactly as he expected, but he will still smile and be happy when he will watch it from Valhalla).
This is the same insane fantasy as 'women will dispense with fatherhood and raise their children communally after conceiving by IVF'. Actually, that's more likely to generate a 100% Aryan world, given who tends to be preferred as a sperm donor. Most children will be born by essentially natural methods, for the same reason the orientals don't breed now- anything that makes children more of a uber-high-investment optimized decision is going to have fewer of them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not strictly on skin tone, but it is a marker for other factors, and it is making things all too easy for aspiring racists. No one cares to learn the subtle class markers like wearing your hat the wrong way or peasant pronunciation of certain vowels when you can just look at their face and instantly determine they are likely to be of a lower socio-cultural-intellectual-spiritual-economical class.
Then let me tell you a little tale about context. Far up north, where the trains don't run and the law is weak, live my in-laws. Dying small town, full of white and native trash. In that town, the only black people are the Jamaican doctors who are the only MDs who will work in a town like that. They're the richest and brightest people in town. So super-black Jamaicans are top of the SES heirarchy, but the rare less-black guy from downstate is considered a degen and likely thief. Nobody has any trouble telling them apart.
I am entirely unsurprised that small town people can remember the few exceptions to the rule.
If there's exceptions, it isn't "darker skin bad". This is the point.
If there's exceptions it means the rule exists. As you yourself stated, the black guys that do not belong to the well-known exception are not trusted.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I suspect the solution from many of these countries will be to pivot to Indian immigration. Most of the culture war in Europe is focused on muslims more than immigrants as a whole, and the thought leaders on the right seems quite comfortable with Indians.
I've been hearing more and more angry anti-Indian sentiment lately.
More options
Context Copy link
Canadian post-COVID immigration was primarily Indian and even that caused backlash. And this is a country that's up there in terms of tolerating immigration. 1% per year for a decade with nary a peep.
The more you take the more you weaken selection effects and deal with the things people don't like about India.
Doesnt mean they wont try.
More options
Context Copy link
Exactly. Trying to compare data from decades prior when you were literally taking the top 1% (In intelligence, family wealth and cosmopolitanism) of Indians who had to hustle and grind every day to get out of India, when now there's scope for the truly Middle Class Indians to get out without moving heaven and earth and in sufficient numbers to easily form enclaves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link