Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Slezkine's The Jewish Century. Also adding Taylor's Sources of the Self to my list. Backlog moving slowly.
Finished The Mothman Prophecies during the week. Good spooky fun, although I hardly believe a word of it. Makes me want to watch the film for the umpteenth time, though I'll have to wait for spooky season. The "prophecies" part of the title refers to how various contactees reported foreknowledge of assorted international events after interacting with Indrid Cold and co. I had to laugh when the first example used to illustrate these entities' supposed prescience was something along the lines "there will soon be a major escalation of one of the conflicts in the Middle East".
My word. Who but a clairvoyant alien superintelligence could have predicted such a thing!
A few months ago on a whim I bought the comic book The Con Artists by the Irish artist Luke Healy, which I read from start to finish on my evening commute the same day I finished Mothman. It concerns two gay men who were childhood friends, one of whom fractures his arm after being hit by a bus, an incident that in turn exposes thitherto unacknowledged tensions in their friendship. Aggressively millennial: the protagonist is a shitty standup comedian who claims to suffer from an anxiety disorder, but can't stop cracking self-deprecating jokes during his therapy sessions. The artwork was clean and minimal to the point of lacking character. Healy is talented both in writing and artwork, but I think he could benefit from getting off Instagram and trying to carve out a more unique identity of his own.
On to The Age of Diagnosis by the Irish physician Suzanne O'Sullivan. My fiancée attended a talk by her to promote her new book and was very impressed: she read this one before I did. O'Sullivan's thesis will be familiar to many of us here: medics now diagnose and prescribe more than they ought, characterising problems as medical disorders when previous generations just considered them personality traits or ordinary slings-and-arrows. The first chapter concerns the ethical dilemmas surrounding whether to get tested for Huntington's disease. O'Sullivan's prose sometimes reads like a case history, but I'm interested to see what ground she covers and how deep into the culture war she goes (in the introduction she touched on "long Covid" and the skyrocketing rates of autism and ADHD diagnoses).
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Let me paint a picture.
Imagine a a person from a developing country. This person knows their home country is terrible and will talk at length on the how and why it is a complete disaster. It’s a combination of the system and the people that are the problem. The society is deeply screwed up for many reasons, but one of them is absolutely massive numbers of low quality people with questionable public hygiene and health.
This person is fed up and leaves. They travel halfway around the world a more wealthy and organized country, but one that’s either on the decline or on the brink of decline. This person shows up in the new country, takes a well paying job that could easily be filled by a local.
Now this person is likely one of the better people from their home country, but they inevitably bring a lot of their socio-cultural baggage with them. They fit right in with the local political party that is more than happy partner with immigrants in exchange for more political power. The person is hostile to the local customs and religion in their new country. In fact, the person goes out of their way to make sure everyone knows what a dim view they take of the historic religion of country that has persisted for thousands of years and dozens of generations. This person associates with other subcultures that are also hostile to the historic culture of the country.
I know I’m not saying anything here that hasn’t been said or thought a mission times but it’s still worth articulating. This person shows up in a new place and every action they take, intentional or otherwise, is destroying the this country’s culture. Remember, this hypothetical country the person went to is already on the brink. Heavily divided and new people like this matter on the margins. And this is not a one-off. In fact there are many other people doing the exact same thing every day.
Anyway, how should this person feel?Should they feel shame? Should others shame them? Do they have any responsibility to assimilate in their new home? Or least leave as little impact as possible.
This is a modern problem. In the US, immigrant communities historically were quite good at assimilating as Americans. Even today, the pressure to do so is lessened, but still exists. In Europe and Uk it seems there’s no such pressure. Immigration there at the scale we currently see is a purely modern phenomenon. And the immigrant communities are insular and shameless in their actions to change the their new countries. My original bias was that this is mainly a function of wealth and class and education. The people who act like this are poor and don’t know any better. I don’t think that’s right though. It seems to me that even this hypothetical immigrant, who would self identify as of the “better ones” has no shame about showing up in a new place and telling the incumbent people everything they’re doing wrong and agitating an already risky political situation.
What is to be done? Short of remigration, can it be fixed? I think it will be challenging since there’s often a political wedge in western democracies where half the country is using immigrants to expand their power base. Half measures will be stopped and fail.
Im not posting this to have a debate on immigration. We’ve done that many times. I’m more curious about what people think of the people who participating in this whole business. What motivations do they have? How should we react to them? Personally I have a pretty dim view of someone who would do something like this. And I’d want to understand how they feel about it. Is it intentional? Can they not help themselves with this behavior? What is it? What do we do?
I guess step one might be to at least point it out.
The average person with a "No human is illegal" sign on their lawn would never, ever, ever act like that. If you described this behavior as "American passport bro goes abroad and acts like an asshole", they would utterly revile him. The thought of going to a foreign country and being indignant that people there don't speak English or mispronouce your name, or misunderstand your customs would disgust and horrify them.
But they don't see immigrants to the West as people, as agents, as adults, as fully human. They see it as something like a shelter dog rescue that makes messes on the floor (even if they'd quietly have such a dog returned and euthanized).
It's hard to escape the conclusion that they're just the most insanely racist people on Earth. Even professional-grade racists like Asians and Slavs don't usually hate themselves too.
As for the immigrants who engage in the behavior you described, I think that behavior is retarded and low-functioning and utterly predictable. Memes want to propogate themselves, and that includes cultures and customs, no matter how poorly they perform at their ostensible function, and that's before we get into the human capital aspect, much less the crab-bucket envy.
Immigration, should we permit it at all, should require an abandonment of old loyalties (including citizenship) and a ban on remitances, and that should probably be Step 1 of the process.
Want to be an American? Burn the bridge behind you. Leave no retreat.
I can't really make sense of it and land on whether they are incredibly racist in favor of anyone who's dark skinned or from a different culture/religion, or against them, as you say.
Both kinda make sense. If you don't view someone as being an agentic human, you don't make any demands of them. In fact in that framework it would be wrong to do so, in the same way that you don't put children in jail for punching someone.
But on the other hand - if you really favor someone, in the way that a person without a moral conscience would stick up for a close friend even if that friend killed an innocent, then you'd let them get away with all sorts of wrongs and breathlessly make excuses for them. This interpretation matches more closely with the following: The strong need (among a majority of Westerners) to be the polar opposite of a colonialist slave-owner or a nazi. And the need to 'balance things out' in some weird Marxist way, between large groups of 'oppressors' versus the 'historically oppressed' or 'underrepresented' people, even if the current generations or specific individuals weren't guilty of the wrongdoing or weren't a victim of the wrongdoing, respectively.
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