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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5642 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

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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AstralCodexten discord and the motte are totally different things! There's a reason they're separate, why the motte left Scott's site and then reddit. It's like being banned from East Germany, you're still fine in West Germany.

but it's also disadvantageous to Asians and Indians

To some extent, I suppose.

psychologically damaging for me, not to mention an intellectual dead end.

What do you mean by this? Psychologically damaging I fully understand. But the basic ideas are sound, are they not? It might be alarming, stressful and disturbing to know that your plane is crashing but it's still important information. Even if any single person can't do anything about it, pointing it out can help. Eventually there might be an option to try to wake up the pilot or storm the cockpit.

Caplan has some good ideas but just undoing all borders is a recipe for disaster. They exist for good reason. The effects on society of open-slather immigration, effects on welfare, language, infrastructure (most Western countries are already struggling to keep up with housing, let alone increase it)... HBD alone is sufficient to nix it, even without the unpleasantness we've seen with Middle Eastern immigration to the West in recent years.

Did you read his graphic novel about open borders? It was great at addressing the economic arguments, just not the cultural ones.

And I say it's a dead end because there's nothing that can be done. Even if we fixed immigration, the call is coming from inside the house. Americans really buy into wokeness, and the people pushing it the hardest are paradoxically the people who have the most to lose from it.

the call is coming from inside the house. Americans really buy into wokeness

Eh, not buying it. If that was true, they wouldn't need such heavy handed censorship. The American elites do, and they don't have anything to lose from it. Although there's the question if they actually believe it, or are pushing it cynically.

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