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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   2756 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 9, 2026

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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Game of Drones - so I was thinking whether the war in Ukraine will lead to China catching up in one of the two areas that they are behind so far from the west - jet engines. Russia started moving from piston to jet for their drones, their appetite is voracious and it plays right where China historically has started their conquest of the supply chain - the bottom. So this is a perfect storm for knowledge gathering - ability for rapid iteration, great demand for performance and customer that has high failure tolerance.

Do you really need a jet engine for loitering munition? At that point it’s just a cruise missile.

Probably not. As I understand it, China has been investing a lot of money into domestic jet engines for decades. The marginal opportunities from an active conflict are small by comparison.

Espionage isn’t going to be enough, either. The U.S. was literally collecting Nazi experts and still took years to integrate early jets. China has picked all that low-hanging fruit.

I remember reading an article about China’s difficulties called something like “why jet engines are hard.” It wasn’t the Construction Physics article, which focuses on the West. I thought it was older than this, too. If I find it, I’ll let you know.

The article you still linked reminded me of how a similar issue affects submarine designs. Even when the Soviets knew all the science they needed to know to build submarines as quiet as the Americans, they were unable to match them because the desired quality, quietness, was directly corelated with the precision of the manufacturing, which is a capability that is not built on knowledge that you can steal by copying someone else's answer sheet, but on decades of expertise up and down the whole manufacturing chain.

Of course, the danger though is that the west might currently be in the process of losing that edge entirely, as decades of overemphasising academic and cultural pursuits for young people leads to no one being left to carry industrial knowledge forward as the baby boomers retire and die.

Exactly. Precision manufacturing requires a lot of things to go right. Then they have to be provably right, which was a recurring problem for the Soviet system.

I think the latter danger is real but not for that reason. Comparative advantage pushed Americans out of manufacturing. We still produce excellent technical professionals*, but they have little incentive to start up an industrial plant. The money is in finance, pharma, software.

When I was in college, the perception of academia was already pretty grim. People were aware of the employment prospects and the shift towards adjunct professors. It’s hard to imagine it getting better in the last ten years.

I’d say cultural work has also taken a beating, though that’s even more subject to my bubble. This is a damn cynical generation. Are they really eager to fight over the last scraps of journalism? Of mass culture?

* I wanted to show this via bls.gov, but the data retrieval tool was “under maintenance.”

After a friend wanted to talk about it, I listened to Smarter Every Day on the problems with capitalism stemming from his trying to "manufacture" something 100% in the us. One of his lament is the lack of metal stamping. And while of course there are many sneaky hard things, I strongly believe that there are plenty of smart technical people in the US that could figure it out in relatively short order with the incentives were there. Especially at the level of stamping BBQ scraper handles.

I'm not sure that's a particularly promising path to success. The jet engines you put on drones (or, with a few caveats, classic fighter jets) don't have much in common with commercial jet engines for airliners. The latter are much more complex. Requirements on fuel efficiency and reliability are much, much less forgiving in commercial aviation. Catching up with the last 10% on fuel efficiency while pushing time-on-wing past 20k hours will be a gigantic effort.

I expect Chinese industry to be perfectly capable of mass producing drone jet engines today. It's just not very difficult to build one that's better than a piston engine. And they already have mass production of a domestic design of military jet engines, after all (until recently, they just weren't all that good - but certainly good enough for drone operations). They also have decades of experience designing and building (ground bound) heavy duty natural gas turbines.

Whether they will catch up with the west on commercial aviation jet engines is mostly a matter of investment. If they decide to invest the resources, it's only a matter of time. But its enormously difficult, so I'd say its unclear if they'll do that and if it's even worth all that much if/when they succeed.

Yeah, I know a guy who makes and sells mini (micro?) jet engines in his garage. TBF, he has nice fabrication machines in his garage, but still. I'd have to confirm how much thrust they actually produce, but production at that level of sophistication is probably sufficient for something that needs to take one attack drone on one trip, without significant efficiency concerns, and a reasonable failure rate is acceptable.

Isn't China's issue the metallurgy rather than the mechanics? I think they could fix that if they throw enough time, money, and researchers at it. Certainly they graduate an absurd number of materials engineers every year, but if they're like the US almost none of them do metallurgy.

Why did the left never make any serious attempt to characterize the assassination of John Lennon as an act of evangelical Christian terrorism? It kind of seems like it would have been a pretty easy propaganda win.

He had this creepy field around him that would allow him to play Lavrentiy Beria in a biopic without much effort. I think that Lennon was in this weird spot where people loved him, but nobody really liked him.

The Christian monoculture was very much still in effect back then. Growing up in the 90s, belonging to a church was very much the default. This was no longer true by, I don't know, 2005?

But why not after? In fact, right at the height of the Atheism vs. Faith flame wars, the left was busy trying to insinuate that the FBI had Lennon killed.

Is Hasan Piker white? I guess he’s Turkish/greek. Looks very white. Just seems interesting that he would talk about replacing whites……when the next move if his side wins would be sending himself to the gulags.

Sort of in the category of Pedro Pascal White. Maybe a little bit less.

That question would be better asked with more precision. If you are literally asking about Hasan's skin colour, then you can just look at him. He has skin as pale as the average European.

If you're asking 'Is he European?', well traditionally Europe ends at Istanbul, which would make Hasan Asian, but his wikipedia page says his father emigrated from Greece, although he has a surname which sound more Turkish, and that his mother has mixed Asian ancestry (Indonesia, Turkey, Kurdistan, Arabia). So on balance I'd describe him as mixed Asian, although that doesn't preclude him from having white skin, as many do in Asia.

I think he's genetically white or close enough, a huge proportion of Turkey is. On a social level I think it's more complicated, "white" is typically used as a synonym for European and someone from a Muslim country outside of Bosnia/Albania fit into that pretty awkwardly, especially if they explicitly behave the way a hostile outsider does.

Ya Romans are white. And there’s still some of them there. He might be predominantly Roman who had forced conversion. He’s actually more white than Fuentes. The interesting thing with white privilege is only Argentina claims whiteness outside of Europe.

My official line is now AOC. Any whiter and you’re white. Since she has an obsession with white men her kids will be white.

She is white - what are you talking about?

She identifies as a women of color. I don’t have a big disagreement since I she is the dividing line. Her skin is a little brown so she definitely has some black or Amerindian in her, but likely 70% European.

She has claimed Taino and Jewish ancestry, and probably there is some truth to that (but I'm very sceptical of "my ancestors were Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition" part, much more likely to be more recent:

"During the early 20th century Jews began to settle in Puerto Rico. The first large group of Jews to settle in Puerto Rico were European refugees fleeing German–occupied Europe in the late 1930s. Puerto Rico's economic boom of the 1950s attracted a considerable number of Jewish families from the U.S. mainland, who were joined after 1959 by an influx of Jewish emigres from Fidel Castro's Cuba.")

"Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, made the reveal on Sunday evening at a Jackson Heights synagogue in Queens, telling the crowd that “a very, very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews.”

She dated her ancestry to those who had to flee Europe during the Spanish Inquisition more than 500 years ago, and sought refuge in the New World. “Some of those people landed in Puerto Rico,” she explained.

“As is the story of Puerto Rico, we are a people that are an amalgamation,” she said. “We are no one thing. We are black; we are indigenous; we are Spanish; we are European.”

She is majority white, though, as is the Puerto Rican population in general:

"Puerto Ricans, on average, have genetic contributions from Europeans, West Africans, and Native Americans of approximately 66%, 18%, and 16%, respectively."

Elizabeth Warren identifies as Cherokee, or at least she did when it benefitted her. That doesn't make her one. If we abandon the actual ancestry, then the only thing left for us is what is profitable for a particular individual in particular moment and do they have enough power to enact it.

Do you all think there is a niche for independent writing these days? Could a Scott-like or similar figure rise out of the ashes of the blogosphere and have success, say, on Substack? As far as I can tell, the platform has been quite effective in attracting a small horde of Gen-Z amateur anthropologists, mainly of the ironic post-feminist variety, though many of them have pre-existing credentials that boosted their writing from the get-go. How do you view the current landscape for aspiring authors?

Do you think there are any meaningful alternatives? I have considered self-hosting, but that could result in even fewer eyes than Substack. At least on Substack, wandering eyes could stumble upon a low-popularity page with enough time and algorithmic noise. I am not even particularly concerned about money - there's just something appealing about having a readership that you can engage in dialogue with your ideas or experiences. High-volume, low-stakes, easily accessible writing that can be commented upon seems to me to be the best way to iterate and improve one's writing skills, rather than slaving away on a novel or a similarly-cloistered writing project.

Study the notes on Substack that get picked up by the algorithm. They're highly artificial and they take a fare bit of skill to craft, but they'll get you large numbers of page views. KulakRevolt manages them regularly. I've managed a few myself. Also important for traffic are front facing materials like cover images, titles, even your Substack's name. In order to get people to stick around, your writing has to actually be good, your authorial personality and overall concept need to be good, but there are achievable mechanisms for driving the raw baseline of traffic you need in the first place.

Blegh, I forgot about Substack notes. I think you're correct, though. As an aside, it's unfortunate that creatives can't just create, they now have to advertise, market, and distribute. I wish we could revitalize the publishing industry (or at least whatever romantic facsimile I hold of the publishing industry) so they could handle all the chaff.

If you can write as good as Sam Kriss, you will enjoy the same success as Sam Kriss. Algorithms make recognition of ability easy, efficient, and reliable. No more languishing in obscurity. The problem is that algorithms also select for cheap, shallow thrills in addition to hardcore skill and talent, so most aspiring writers take the easy route of producing trash for the masses (see KulakRevolt and Scott Alexander) rather than more significant aesthetic works.

Overall, the market for writing may have shrunk as well, as the attention economy has gotten hyper saturated. It may follow the general trend we're seeing of entry and midlevel opportunities drying up as things become more concentrated at the highest levels. That's probably also the work of efficient markets.

What’s a good Sam Kriss passage / article?

The law that can be named is not the true law and the follow-up Against Truth give you a good feel for his style, strengths, and weaknesses (no, it is not actually good to be against truth). I'm partial to Douglas Murray, gruesome toady and The world’s first matcha labubu genocide, which is unfortunately behind a partial paywall.

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/numb-at-burning-man

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/in-my-zombie-era

This one's pretty good: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-century-of-the-maxxer

Mm, this really isn't true. If you write like Sam Kriss into the void, you'll enjoy approximately zero organic success. You need to both write like Sam, and market like him, to enjoy success like him. There are platforms that will drive viewership organically to your writing. Most of them are places to read fiction for free. If you want to write blogs, you're gonna need to market yourself.

If you write to his level on Substack, the algorithm's going to pick you up and you're going to get a ton of subscribers and even enough paid subscribers to make a decent income. I'd also count his ability to market himself and manage how he comes across as a personality as part of his writer's skillset, especially in how it directly informs the content of his writing. But there's much less necessary hustle than you make it seem. Putting quality stuff on Substack is alone sufficient to gain some measure of success.

Substack's algorithm doesn't work like that, unless you drive viewership from other platforms you're gonna get almost zero visibility.

@Turniper @RedRegard What do you think is necessary for a writer trying to market themselves? I'm not terribly familiar with Sam Kriss' public image - how does he position his work?

I'm less familiar with Kriss than I am with marketing writing. Substack is a platform you basically need to funnel to via a big twitter or youtube account. Other people's substacks and tiktok are also good options. It doesn't give you much organic visibility, even if people view and comment, you need another way to drive links. It's more of a bottom of funnel than a top of funnel place, with good monetization options for dedicated fans.

What is the meaning of life in at most 3 sentences?

My (provisional) answer: Do right by your family and friends. Enjoy your life. Leave the world better as a result of your existence.

Wanting the right things, and getting them.

Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world

Nobody's going to do it? Nobody? Alright, I'll jump on that grenade for the good of all.

To crush your enemies.

To see them driven before you.

To hear the lamentations of their women.

I was about to say the open steppe, a fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair, but I knew about how well that would have been received.

I should buy a boat falcon and a horse.

He has shown you, o man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

What is the meaning of life in at most 3 sentences?

what you decide the meaning of life to be. it doesn't really matter. But it will really matter to you.

I think the more interesting question for mottizens would be: What is your meaning of life?

Heidegger, I think, clarifies this: "Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself. That which can be articulated in disclosure that understands we call meaning. The concept of meaning includes the formal framework of what necessarily belongs to what interpretation that understands articulates. Meaning, structured by fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception, is the upon which of the project in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something. Insofar as understanding and interpretation constitute the existential condition of the being of the there, meaning must be conceived as the formal, existential framework of the disclosedness belonging to understanding. Meaning is an existential to Dasein, not a property which is attached to beings, which lies 'behind' them or floats somewhere as a 'realm between'. Only Dasein 'has' meaning in that the disclosedness of being-in-the-world can be 'fulfilled' through the beings discoverable in it. Thus only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless."

To put it into three sentences: Meaning is something we always have and create as we live in the world. The concept of meaning is the reflexive self-understanding of our primal and direct relationship to the world around us, and, as such, can neither be absent from, created artificially by, or inhabited directly by Dasein (us). Meaning is fundamentally a secondary concept which we use to understand who and what we are and, while it's an important one, is not itself what we actually care about, and so a fixation on the meaning of life is at best only a way to get to life itself.

(apologies for any typoes in the quote, I typed from the book rather than looking for a pdf)

Well that makes me feel bett r t about my 5 clauses!

Pursue wellbeing for your collective according to how humans are designed, which is as a social species with mandatory requirements for felicity. This is what “love your neighbor as yourself” means, but neighbor should absolutely not refer to those merely around you or those in your economic zone blob, unless you want to destroy love itself and all morality. The greatest commandment — to love God with your All — is a requirement to truly love neighbor under a sufficiently intelligent understanding of human evolutionary design.

Discern and cultivate processes that lead to long-term welfare and happiness for youself and others. Discern and reduce processes that lead to long-term suffering for yourself or others.

Mu. Alternatively, invalid type.

It doesn't matter.

One could do worse than Ecclesiates 9:9-10 and 12:13:

Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life which He has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity; for that is your portion in life, and in the labor which you perform under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.

Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man’s all.

I suppose that's cheating because it's 5 clauses packed into those three sentences.

A wise man once said “the purpose of a system is what it does”. The meaning of life is to do what you’re physically going to anyways, and consciously experience it. Not baseless pleasures; this includes introspection to determine what you truly want.

Work.

Pay taxes.

Die (this may result in further taxes being paid).

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.

During my latest digital fast, I tried to read The Man Who Was Thursday. Put it down after just a couple of pages, because I couldn't stand Chesterton's insufferable smugness. Is he always like that?

Lazily going through How Not to Write a Novel. There's only so many jokes you can make about a badly written novel, and my patience with the authors' sense of humor is wearing thin.

Put it down after just a couple of pages, because I couldn't stand Chesterton's insufferable smugness.

I am filled with deep sorrow for your affliction. To be cut off from sources of joy due to incompatibility - alas!

Surprised by your reaction to the latter. I've read it so many times there are entire passages I can quote from memory. One of the funniest books I've ever read. I also thinks it contains a great deal of genuinely useful writing advice, much of which is applicable to all kinds of prose (not just fiction).

America against America by Wang Hunig Chinas chief ideologue, worth a read both to see another perspective and since it was written in ‘91 it’s basically history now.

Finished The Screwtape Letters - extremely illuminating and thought-provoking book. On the lighter side, continued my quest through the Dresden Files with the Ghost Story. Dresden seems to reach peek goofiness in this one, it's a fun read but in the terms of universe/character development it seems to walk in circles. Hopefully it's a gravity assist maneuver for what's to come next.

Started The Seventh Function of Language - sounds to be fun so far, though a lot of it might be outside my depth, as I am not that knowledgeable in the details of contemporary French philosophy and linguistics and its personalities. I know the names but I think a lot of stuff he's making fun of them for goes right over my head.

Finished The Screwtape Letters - extremely illuminating and thought-provoking book.

It's a good one. Even entirely leaving aside the theological frame, this quote:

The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

...is a notable piece of cosmic horror, and in my experience observably true.

I've been meaning to read Screwtape. Out of interest, how long was your copy, and how long did it take you to read it?

I used an audiobook on Libby, it's about ~4 hours long and I listened to it in several takes.

On the lighter side, continued my quest through the Dresden Files with the Ghost Story. Dresden seems to reach peek goofiness in this one, it's a fun read but in the terms of universe/character development it seems to walk in circles.

IDK, for my money, Ghost Story does develop most of the main characters of the series, It's a Wonderful Life Style, but moreover, it contains one of, if not the, most powerful scene(s) in the series at its climax thus far -- revealing to Harry the pain and suffering he caused Molly, specifically, by asking her to bear the burden of assisting him in his attempt at suicide-by-proxy via calling in the favor that Kincaid owed him, and having her erase it from his memory so he wouldn't know to look out for his own assassination. It's still my favorite of the series, and may well stay that way unless Butcher pulls another rabbit out of his hat like that one.

And FTR, the other two scenes that, for me, compete with the previous one are Harry's first meeting with Uriel in Small Favor and Murphy's Death and Butter's subsequent intervention preventing Harry from killing Murphy's murderer in Battle Ground.

About the Molly part - I still can't believe he did it to her. I mean dude, she's still a kid, couldn't you find some other way? I mean it's a very clever twist, I grant that, but it doesn't reflect well on Harry tbh. He is usually choosing to be decent to most people around him, and when the situation calls for being shitty, that's where he decides to turn to? I didn't feel good about it. Also, it means that not only the Corpsetaker problem had been made much worse by Harry, but the whole shitshow is actually of his making, and he doesn't even have a good reason for it, as it turns out. If he did exactly nothing, he'd be pretty much in the same place as he was at the end, except with much less casualties. That's a bit like this one: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kWE6M-rhh2U

Oh, I completely agree, and this is what makes the moment so poignant for me: Harry knew exactly what we was doing when he asked, knew that what he needed, what he was asking for was completely unfair to ask of Molly, and he asked it anyway. And as a result, things got a lot worse, for Chicago in general as well as for his friends in particular. If Butcher hadn't spent so much time and so many novels developing those relationships, the book never would have worked, but because he did, that book in general and the climax in particular played my personal heart strings like a fiddle, and that's what makes me love him as an author so much: he tends to put the work into his character development, making those moments pay off when they hit. Throughout the series, Harry fucks up a lot, his choices have consequences, sometimes big ones, and sometimes, like in Ghost Story he has good reason for his choices, like, y'know, saving his daughter from the Red Court at all costs, selling his soul to do so, and trying to cheat Mab herself out her prize! YMMV and all, but for me, when I think of the things that I've read that have personally moved me, Clive Barker's Imajica is the only one that comes quickly to mind that isn't a Dresden Files book.

I think in the most recent books, Harry is finally starting to grow up. He's a great guy and his heart is in the right place, but he has a long history of making really, really bad decisions.

And a lot of that is due to his background, where his mentor DuMorne very carefully shaped him to distrust and confront all authority, thus cutting him off from a lot of sources of information and education he badly needed as he was developing. This left Harry with a smart-ass attitude that, even without all the other strikes against him, would put him at loggerheads with anyone and any body he saw as trying to be the boss of him, so that even now there are breadcrumbs throughout the novels of things he should know but doesn't. He also has severe White Knight Syndrome where any baddie can easily manipulate him by putting a woman or innocent person in danger. Harry relies on the strength of his talents and magic to just bulldoze an answer to any problem, and while that was okay when he was going up against evil mages, he is now on a completely higher and more dangerous level where he will have to use his brain instead.

I like Harry, but there were times in the books when I wanted to slap him due to his "don't think, just bulldoze" approach (and eh, his views on women; there's a few too many Fridged Exes in his life but then again Butcher has been writing this character over a very long time and when he started, Harry was your typical mid-20s guy who likes tits and beer. It was fun urban fantasy with a male character as written by a guy and wasn't really intended to be anything more serious than that, I don't think.)

Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore. Started strong, then the fantasy world really started to drag for quite a while, but now it's getting interesting as the mysterious, beautiful, aristocratic woman enters and throws everything into chaos, as is wonderfully mandatory for mid-century European literature. Two big departures from Gracq's A Balcony in the Forest: long and overwrought descriptive passages, which I honestly just don't enjoy, and a protagonist who isn't afraid to be genuinely unlikeable at times. He's angry, snippy, and petty exactly when you want him to learn more and get people to open up to him about what's going on. Overall, I'm interested in seeing where things go, but I don't think it'll top A Balcony in the Forest for me, if only because that book has the indisputably perfect setting (the Phoney War) for Gracq's style.

I have attempted to finish The Opposing Shore on, I think, four separate occasions since I was a teenager. I have never managed to do it. But yeah, there is something about the world he created that keeps dragging me back there. I'll finish it some day.

If you enjoy Gracq, I would be curious to know what you think about The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti. The two novels have, to me, an extremely similar "vibe."

Thank you, I will put it on the list! Honestly, I strongly considered putting The Opposing Shore down around 15% through (I'm reading on a kindle, no page numbers), but now things are heating up I'll keep going. Have you tried A Balcony in the Forest?

I checked it out from the library once about five years ago, and as I recall, I did not actually attempt to read it; for which I am somewhat embarrassed, honestly.

If I remembering correctly, I did penance for shying away from what, at the time, I feared would be too difficult a book for me, by reading Joseph Conrad's Victory. Victory had various positive attributes, particularly the impressive characterization of the characters Heyst, Ricardo, and Wang; but I found it rather weakly plotted and the ending was very unconvincing, and I would not go so far as to recommend it.

Yes, I read Victory when I was a teenager absolutely enamoured of Conrad, and even then I felt it was distinctly weak. Balcony is a really, really good read imo.

A Storm of Swords for my third reread+ a Spanish audiobook about the Isabella of Castille learning chess (El tablero de la reina). The former is as awesome as I remember it, and Tywin comes off worse and worse on each reread. The latter is okay, but very Ken Follett-coded and I don't believe the characters are real medieval people.

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 this 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 the ordinary slings-and-arrows life throws at us. 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, and she has an annoying predilection for sentence fragments which should have been caught by a copy-editor, 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).

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.

Short of remigration, can it be fixed?

Xinjiang style will fix it quite fast.

Who cares? Everyone has a right to act in their own self-interests to an extent. For the immigrant that is to come to America. For the American most of the time it’s to keep them out of America.

It’s just conflict theory. Act in your own best interests. I don’t need to apologize for blocking immigration and the immigrant doesn’t need to apologize for taking advantage of my idiot neighbors.

Do you think the Spanish cried when they thru Aztecs into silver mines? Or the Romans conquered Celtic territory? Might makes right.

I come from an immigrant family that runs the gamut on this.

My parents don't care. Or rather: they're totally pragmatic. They came to America because it's the best place to be. When Trump does something annoying on an immigration level they take it with fatalism because what are you gonna do? They know they don't deserve to be in America in the AOC/Billie Eilish "no one is illegal on stolen land" sense, but it's good so they want to stay.

They don't hate the culture. Except maybe for its licentiousness but their response to this is to just stay the hell away from that shit, not try to change it. They don't get into the drama and they don't really care that you think the culture is being destroyed. That's your culture war, if you don't want immigrants don't take any?

My brother and sister on the other hand, are basically American leftists since they came so late that Africa is an abstraction to them. Constant talk about how racist America is. Why do they talk this way? Besides the fact that everything in pop culture was telling them this sort of thing was cool? Besides the fact that the natural retort that cuts down on this - "go back to your country" - was considered a macroaggression? Besides the fact that it's the common take from high status industries and people? Besides the fact that those people tell them the other side wants them dead or deported or oppressed?

They absorbed the same attitude as the people around them (except without any irony or balance from knowing a broad cross-section of Americans or having a deep link to the country), and the same embarrassment about inequity (we were once subject to a speech about how good street vendors in Freetown were compared to supermarkets because I guess supermarkets are Western and inauthentic?) except even worse for lacking a strong American history and actually coming from those countries. So they double down on the rhetoric they've been told is an answer.

Thing is: it doesn't have to be this way. Poor Africans are by this logic even bigger victims of the West than immigrants yet this wasn't common growing up. If anything, people were pretty embarrassingly obsequious towards the British (some of the stereotypes of wypipo had the younger generation rolling our eyes).

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.

Right, so you understand the problem exactly. What's to discuss? The problem is other Americans.

It doesn't matter what immigrants think. Immigrants can be assimilated or made to say various prosocial things if they are forced to by the populace. Instead you've failed to form a unified front, so kids will misbehave. That's it.

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?

People generally don't walk around contemplating the societal implications of their actions, but for what it's worth I'll paraphrase what my relatives and others have had to say to me about it over the years. The mindset presented is I think to a large degree generalizable to different immigrant groups, but perhaps least so to Muslims for whom religion is a larger driver of behavior. Make of it what you will.

Q: Why did you come to America? And why [city] in particular?
A: We had a friend who said it was easy to find a job there.

Q: Did you always want to emigrate?
A: I didn't care either way. It was just for work.

Q: What did you think about Americans before you came here?
A: I thought they were all good looking like in the movies, handy like MacGyver, and smarter and harder working than us. How else could they have become so rich and built such wondrous technology?

Q: What do you think about Americans now?
A: They're fat, stupid, and lazy, and their food tastes like shit. The first time I saw a homeless person begging in the street I couldn't believe my eyes. I thought "You're not a cripple and are still young enough to work. Why the hell don't you have a job? You were born here! How could you have so thoroughly pissed away all your advantages in life to end up in this state?"

Q: If Americans are stupid and lazy, then where did all the technology come from?
A: The Americans a hundred years ago were different; they were like the ones I imagined in my head before. They came from poverty and built everything with their own hands, but their descendants are a bunch of spoiled brats who are letting it fall into ruin. This is an inevitable process with nations and families. My descendants will probably be like that too.

Q: Would you ever move back to your home country?
A: Of course not! It's hot and dingy and poor and [rant about local politics]. On second thought maybe when I'm old and retired. They treat their elders better there and don't throw them in nursing homes to rot.

Q: What do you think about the number of immigrants coming from your home country?
A: Obviously I don't want them all here; it was such a relief to get away from those people! But if my siblings or cousins want to come that's fine. Family is different.

Q: Do you want your children to be closer to American culture or their ancestral culture? What sort of future do you want for them?
A: What matters to me is that they have a good standard of living. Anyone who grows up here is going to be Americanized, but I speak my language to them because it's easier for me and because maybe it will give them international job opportunities in the future. If things remain fine in America they should stay, but if the economy is bad then they should leave and go someplace better.

Q: You're a naturalized citizen now. Does that make you an American?
A: What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I'm not an American! Don't insult me like that again.

Q: If Americans are stupid and lazy, then where did all the technology come from? A: The Americans a hundred years ago were different; they were like the ones I imagined in my head before. They came from poverty and built everything with their own hands, but their descendants are a bunch of spoiled brats who are letting it fall into ruin. This is an inevitable process with nations and families. My descendants will probably be like that too.

Foreigners from poor countries are quite well aware that, even today, Americans are vastly more productive and advanced. Though, I grant, there's a contempt for your decadence - especially the homo shit.

Coping that America isn't that far ahead seems like a thing for Europeans, maybe. The Third World cope is more likely to be "the American Empire does it by robbing us"

I'm not really sure what the point of this post is aside from getting people to gang up on and dogpile about "immigrants bad". It's a bit of a hot topic for smallscale question sunday, but a bit devoid of true value for the culture war thread. The majority of people here, myself included, have some variation of centrist (some leaning left, some leaning right), or very right wing take on immigration, and if any don't and for some reason decide to respond I fully expect a debate to break out.

I am not a mod, I am not formally accusing you of breaking the "Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity" rule. But I am going to gesture at it disapprovingly.

I tried to very carefully avoid consensus building by keeping it general. And it’s not a policy debate.

In my opinion, I find the behavior I described to be very rude (at the very least). I want to know what others think. And if they think it’s not rude, I’d certainly like to hear why not.

I don’t know how many economic migrants we have here on TheMotte, but perhaps if there is one here, they can share their experience.

I came upon this X thread right before reading your comment: https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/2086713323022659973

The thesis is that there are two reasons why a man will hate you:

  • He will hate you because you harmed him.

  • And he will hate you because he has harmed you.

A man who has harmed you needs you to deserve it, so that he can still feel good about himself. And he will find excuses to think that, because humans are good at telling stories.
Welfare takers don't hate you even though your taxes keep them alive. They hate you because your taxes keep them alive.
The criminal underclass doesn't rob you because they hate you. They hate you because they rob you.

A political refugee fleeing a communist state will love their new country. They are not hurting their new countrymen, they are contributors and they love their new freedom. Their new freedom does not detract from everyone else's freedom, they are adding to their host country's freedom by demonstrating the beauty of that freedom to those who maybe have become complacent in it.

An economic refugee fleeing a shit hole will have to accept lots of financial and other help. If that financial help is coming from a wealthy benefactor who is willingly giving the support, then maybe it can be tolerated because there is a personal relationship. If that financial help is coming from a tax base that is increasingly strained, that financial aid is coming from hurting the native populace, even if that pain is intentionally spread out to be tolerated. And so the economic immigrant has to find a reason why the native population deserves this pain, reasons why this harm is just. And if there are no obvious reasons, reasons will need to be invented.

I think this might get more responses in the Culture War thread. I worry I've crossed the line already in this post though we've kept it vague so far.

Thanks. I thought all of these responses brought interesting idea to the table.

And yes, I’m hesitant to bring to the main thread as well.

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.

The average person with a "No human is illegal" sign on their lawn would never, ever, ever act like that.

More or less true. The rest of this comment is basically slander.

They see it as something like a shelter dog rescue that makes messes on the floor

There’s probably a leftist out there who would endorse the racist paternalism you describe, but that person is not an “average person.” The concept is so far outside the Overton window that it horseshoes around to the general fringe category.

even if they'd quietly have such a dog returned and euthanized

Oh, come on. It wasn’t enough to make a strawman of the policy? You had to have them killing puppies, too?

It's hard to escape the conclusion that they're just the most insanely racist people on Earth.

I don’t believe that you want to escape that conclusion.

Even professional-grade racists like Asians and Slavs don't usually hate themselves too.

Perhaps this is because “racist” is the wrong label for what you’re describing.

You’re putting an awful lot of words in people’s mouths. If those words are shocking and incoherent, if you notice you are confused, maybe they aren’t the right words.

There’s probably a leftist out there who would endorse the racist paternalism you describe, but that person is not an “average person.”

True, prosecutors and judges tend not to be average people. In that case, you have 2 possibilities: either the true belief is limited to them, or it's politically advantageous for them to act in a way indistinguishable from believing it [in which case we need to ask why that is, and we can assume that, because some of these are elected positions, that the charge of racist paternalism can be said to extend to a significant portion of the population, or at the very least it doesn't bother them].

they're just the most insanely racist people on Earth.

I think most of the moral sentiment that caused racism in the first place is absolutely alive and well (in that some people have a psychological need for an enemy outgroup categorized by simple observable markers like skin color and gender, and furthermore that people who do this are inferior themselves), and I even believe Progressives when they claim it's [relatively] uniquely a problem with whites. Perhaps ironically, I think this is an HBD thing.

Naturally, I am highly suspect of a race of people who then seem to exempt themselves because they say "look we're maximally discriminatory against ourselves on the basis of race", because the intent is the crime, not the fact it was ever done (which is also the problem with other X-supremacy groups, most notably feminists/gynosupremacists). The correct lesson, and one the classical-liberals tried to teach in the '70s, is that the correct way to not be discriminatory on the basis of race is to not be discriminatory on the basis of race; their folly is that this discriminatory behavior is, in fact, innate to white people (and cannot be trained out of them), and they were just laying the grounds for the (overwhelmingly white) daughters of the Confederacy to roll right back over them with their new racism after classical-liberalism reached its high water mark that decade.

Which also explains the related phenomenon where a non-trivial number of [assuming/acting in the progressive framing] "white supremacists" are black or hispanic (or married to one). That inconsistency is resolved if you assume Progressives are more guilty of the discriminatory-intent-mind-crime (which is what non-progressives actually mean by "racism") than those who they accuse of it.

It doesn't need to be if you accept the progressive framing that "white supremacy" means "being of a mental state that opposes the progressive power structure", but at that point "white supremacy" is not the actual crime.

some people have a psychological need for an enemy outgroup categorized by simple observable markers like skin color and gender, and furthermore that people who do this are inferior themselves

It occurs to me that there is a funny counter factual out there where people of different skin colors are really all nearly identical on all the measurable things that are supposed to matter (intelligence, crime, education, financial outcomes, hygiene, health, inhabiting clean a tidy communities, etc.) and then you have the racists making enemies of certain pigments. But then they would struggle to come up with any reason why they don’t like group besides the mere color of their skin. It would be rather ludicrous. I suppose there are a lot of people who do think that’s our current situation.

Is it really the skin color that people object to when they think about immigrants?

It occurs to me that there is a funny counter factual out there where people of different skin colors are really all nearly identical on all the measurable things that are supposed to matter (intelligence, crime, education, financial outcomes, hygiene, health, inhabiting clean a tidy communities, etc.) and then you have the racists making enemies of certain pigments

Once you control for class filter bubbles (i.e. if you believe the only people who exist are middle or upper class, and in that case/context, what you have stated is literally true) this is exactly how progressives behave (the pigments they hate are white and yellow). It's not ludicrous, it's personally advantageous- those classes are shrinking, so as any good whore rational actor would do they sell their dignity and do stupid things like "be racist against themselves" (the upper class that pays them loves a good self-hating worker who tells their fellow workers they deserve lower wages because of their pigment). That is how they defect against everyone else, by signalling that a lower [sociofinancial] salary will be acceptable to them, and the other workers who won't do the same thing should be fired (or killed).

It's the exact equivalent to a scab working behind a picket line, just using an expanded sociofinancial sense of salary, not just the financial one most are used to. Rational, yes; but the union response to that sends goons to their homes to extract a little rent of their own, and so far that clearly hasn't been happening for a bunch of reasons that are out of scope of this response.

There’s probably a leftist out there who would endorse the racist paternalism you describe, but that person is not an “average person.” The concept is so far outside the Overton window that it horseshoes around to the general fringe category.

Openly endorse it? Never. That's a second order consequence that would make them look bad, so it's basically an antimeme.

Live every day as though that were a fair and accurate description of their true beliefs? Yes, I observe it personally all the time, it's a constain refrain in their published works ("X bad behavior is just a reflection of the oppression they suffer!" is an entire genre of progressive articles), and it's borne out in studies and research (e.g. progressives dumbing down their speech and downplaying their competence when speaking with black/brown people).

Perhaps this is because “racist” is the wrong label for what you’re describing.

What's a better one?

If those words are shocking and incoherent, if you notice you are confused, maybe they aren’t the right words.

The confusion was wondering why progressive people I know seem incapable of assigning blame for bad behavior to anyone but straight white men. The "words in their mouths" may be less than charitable, but they're an explanation that resolves the confusion.

Do you have a better one?

Maybe they won't endorse it because, you know, they don't believe it? Second-order consequences are for nerds.

The modal progressive believes that people deserve the same standard of living. When reality falls short, he blames the people with the most money and power. In America, that's usually white dudes, but anybody who does well enough gets trimmed out of the coalition. See Asians. The rest of the world imports their narrative from us whether or not it makes sense.

Sometimes, he gets a slice of that money and power, then drives himself nuts trying to bring the world a little closer to his ideal. Call it "neurotic philanthropy."

Maybe they won't endorse it because, you know, they don't believe it?

What does that have to do with anything? Do you use that standard to disregard all criticisms of conservatives? "Well, they say that aren't Xist, so you should stop calling them that." In either case, we can look beyond people's own self-conceptions. Though IME, if you lay out enough rope in the right circumstances it really isn't hard to trip leftists into essentially stating "Whites are the master race and that's a bad thing". They just absolutely will not close the loop, and it's fascinating to watch play out.

The modal progressive believes that people deserve the same standard of living.

Right, which is why they had the national guard deport the busload of immigrants who made it to Martha's Vinyard.

But I'm not even talking about vast, general trends. I'm talking about specific individuals. I can tell my progressive friends about an absolute fucking idiot I encountered, and the part where I literally saw her committing welfare fraud, and if I phrase it to imply she's a low-class white, they laugh and sneer. If I reveal she's Hispanic, they suddenly find vast reserves of sympathy and patience.

It's the exact phenomenon Scott wrote about where all his oh-so empathetic friends were very humanistic and somber when bin Laden died and then turned around to chant "DING DONG THE BITCH IS DEAD" when Thatcher passed, but very clearly race/culture coded. The same people who would express grave concerns about the brutal consequences of America's prison system on the brown illigrant who raped and murdered a teenaged white girl would laugh about TheNybbler going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison if he failed to mention an elementary school shrink visit on a gun permit.

It certainly looks like they think he's the master race, and ought to have known better and deserves what he gets, while imprisoning the poor immigrant is like beating an animal that doesn't understand it did something wrong.

Solzhenitsyn wrote on this. Remember that kerfluffle? Remember Ma'khia Bryant?

I once had a Haitian kid who worked for me. He apparently straight up told the (female) hiring manager "I have a learning disability. I just need someone to give me a chance.", and so he was hired and assigned to me. He wasn't a bad guy, but his general level of competence and basic problem-solving was painful. And the amazing thing was watching some of my most diffcult, entitled, asshole regular customers suddenly turn into kindergarten teachers when he was helping them, just so proud of themselves for being patient and understanding with the slow guy with an accent. I have a white kid now who isn't nearly as bad, and the same customers treat him like something to scrape off their shoes if I can't interceed.

When reality falls short, he blames the people with the most money and power.

It's not reality falling short, it's people. Individual humans. It wasn't reality that repeatedly raped a 10 year old, it was Tue Lue Vang, who was pardoned by Tim Walz and Keith Ellison to protect him from consequences. Meanwhile Brock Turner is a vile piece of subhuman shit who deserves to spend his life being raped in prison.

If someone isn't willing to hold an immigrant to the same standards as a native, then they ought to have to justify that stance. And if their own ideology says that such a disparate impact is obvious evidence of giga-racism, then they should have to weasel their way out of that too.

should require an abandonment of old loyalties

That wouldn't happen - people do not work this way. I mean, you can get people to say anything, especially if you pay them to say it and punish them if they don't, but words are wind, they'd say one thing and will enact another. Retaining the feelings for the "old country" is a common immigrant theme, and you will never get rid of it. You can, however, combine it with the loyalty for the new country - and in the US, this had been successfully achieved by generations of immigrants. People may be proud of their Irish ancestry (completely random here on the specific origin, would apply to the most of other origins) but you wouldn't find many to keep up with contemporary Irish politics and try to mold US society in was that would benefit Ireland - most people don't think that way and wouldn't know where to begin if they did. There's no need to burn any bridges because those bridges, for the longest time, stayed in one's imagination and one's past. You don't need to burn the past to have a future.

This however changed with the advent of wokeness and multiculturalism. This is a religion that says your past is your future, and there is no escape. Not only you are not expected to go towards your future without being bound by the past, the mere suggestion that one might do it is considered the supreme sin. Nobody can ask you to assimilate, and whoever even hints of it is the enemy. This is what broke the model. The premise that your old loyalties always define what your new loyalties must be, and it can not be and must not be otherwise. What previously had been a weird exception, became the norm. And since it is hardwired into the ideology ruling one of the major US parties, it is hard to de-normalize now - any attempt at it would automatically be considered as a partisan attack.

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.

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.

incredibly racist in favor of anyone who's dark skinned or from a different culture/religion, or against them, as you say.

As in they implicitly assume third worlders to be subhumans who aren’t responsible for their own behavior.

To be fair, it's not only third-worlders. They oppose criminal justice, on the premise that the criminals are never responsible for their own actions - it's the society that formed them and the circumstances that the external oppressive powers put them in. Since the society, in their ideology, is hopelessly broken, nobody can be held accountable for their crimes. They would apply it to the neighbor next door as readily as the third-worlder - provided that the neighbor belongs to one of the privileged categories. Of course, this instantly dissolves once the subject is of the disfavored category - then the script flips and it's the inherent evil always present in people of such category that is the reason.

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