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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2951 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 16, 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?

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Has anyone run into a really good case against the Great Replacement theory?

It requires too much coordination among elites.

That people do vote in leaders who enact the policies. If people really hated immigrations that much, they simply would always vote conservative.

To be fair, voting Republican because of immigration didn't work under Reagan, or Bush, or even Trump.

If people consistently voted the same way and by large margins, it would enact a shift. I don't think Reagan was particularly anti-immigration when campaigning. Trump didn't win by that large a margin and didn't have the biggest mandate. If the anti-immigration conservatives were selected in primaries and then those conservatives overwhelmingly won seats in the general election, I think you'd see a very sharp decline in immigration very fast.

The two party system does have limitations, but both sides want to win generally. If people actually hated immigration but reluctantly voted Democrat to get stuff like welfare, Democrats could shift to be anti-immigration while keeping their other policies the same and sweep the elections.

Don't know if this counts as a refutation, but I don't think it's so much the Great Replacement, as it is the Great Meat Grinder. Once the immigrants settle down, they're infected with the same modernist mind virus, and cease to reproduce themselves. Years down the line they will probably be replaced with even fresher immigrants.

Our elites have been in love with Malthusianism for over a century, even though they can't be quite as open about it as they used to be, you still hear noises from people like Bill Gates musing about getting the reproduction rate down in poor countries. Even when they're not openly discussing depopulation, you can see them drooling at the thought of technologies that will atomize us even more effectively, and the first question on their mind is "how can we make sure everyone gets these?".

I think this theory fits a lot better with the stated and documented motivations of our rulers than mere replacement of a particular race.

Has anyone run into a really good case against the Great Replacement theory?

While I don't think "western democracies" are properly democracies these days, neither are they despotic. They don't rule by fear, but by meeting the demands of various interest groups and the people. Skilled professionals at least. (And the rest enough so they don't rebel.)

"The people" demand a comfortable lifestyle and rights that reduce fertility to <1.5 TFR. These demands, unfortunately, contradict each other. Cheap consumer goodies and early retirements need cheap labor to pick the fruit, make the iphones, and empty the bedpans.

Western governments are resolving this contradiction by importing young people from abroad and offshoring what dirty work they can to other countries. Is this popular? No. Is it out of malice for the natives? No. It's just that the other solutions to the problem would be more unpopular.

It's not the newcomers' fault if the ancestral population won't reproduce. Great Cohabitation Theory sounds a lot less ominous.

It's not the newcomers' fault

Most versions don't focus the fault of migrants, AFAICT.

GRT doesn’t claim that immigrants are at fault, though. GRT claims that domestic leadership is at fault. The leadership is at fault by (1) ignoring the realities of race and culture or the projected statistics on fertility rates, (2) beholden to an anti-white “conspiracy”, which (2a) is influenced by anti-white academics sometimes or (2b) is influenced by Jewish groups that benefit as they retain strong in-group biases while everyone else de-homogenizes.

One argument against (2b) in Europe is that the Muslim migrants generally do not like Israel and are already exerting influence to reduce their country’s alignment with Israel.

(2) beholden to an anti-white “conspiracy”, which (2a) is influenced by anti-white academics sometimes

  1. Immigration massively benefits poor, non-white immigrants themselves, so it's our moral duty to promote it.

  2. Unfortunately the white majority is racist in various ways, from passing racist laws limiting immigration in the first place, to systemically exploiting illegal immigrants, to whites oppressing nonwhites on an individual yet systemic level (for example, managers are likely to be white, white managers are likely to have unconscious biases against nonwhite subordinates).

  3. Asking whites nicely to stop being racist hasn't worked yet and is unlikely to suddenly start working, therefore it's our moral duty to seek other solutions.

  4. Decreasing the proportion of whites in the society will gradually strip them of their democratic and societal power and improve the situation. Note that things improve on the margin too, we don't need to wait until the white population drops below some magical fraction to see results, every percent of fewer whites makes things better for nonwhites.

Therefore a moral duty of every person who believes in (1), (2), and (3) (which is every liberal/progressive/left-leaning person) is to support (4) as a goal, support things like increased non-white immigration and oppose any attempts to increase white fertility, with an explicit purpose of making western countries less white.

There's no need for a "conspiracy" if everyone with certain beliefs pushes for certain political actions that follow from those beliefs with a near mathematical inevitability. Of course if you ask a progressive white if they really want to make whites a minority they would vehemently deny it, though without any principled argument for why not. And they sure do act in ways that are consistent with them believing in the moral necessity of (4), at least unconsciously.

(2b) is influenced by Jewish groups that benefit as they retain strong in-group biases while everyone else de-homogenizes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181107090043/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/magazine/george-soros-democrat-open-society.html is a very interesting article, not only it's a respectable journalist writing for a paper of record unlike some lunatic rambling for hours on youtube, but also rather than being hostile to the conspiracy he wholeheartedly supports it; rather than exposing it he boasts about it. How can we not believe him?

(you probably want to read the intro of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl for some context)

There's no need for a "conspiracy" if everyone with certain beliefs pushes for certain political actions that follow from those beliefs with a near mathematical inevitability.

Except that people who believe 1, 2, and 3 do not openly state 4 is their goal. Instead they claim it's a conspiracy theory. If you're right that 4 is a moral necessity, and they're right it's a conspiracy theory, it follows that they are in fact conspiring.

"Conspiracy" is a complicated concept involving several different attributes. Consider for example CIA did 9/11 the Iran-Contra affair:

  1. It's coordinated and centralized.

  2. When/if exposed most people agree that it was immoral and bad.

  3. People perpetuating it know that it will be considered immoral and bad.

  4. It's executed in secret, so people assume that its effects (such as the crack epidemic) are exaggerated or caused by natural processes or whatever.

There are also secondary attributes, for example there's a solid argument that (1) + (2) + (3) together mean that it's hard to run a large conspiracy because every person involved increases the chance that someone snitches.

But there are also semi-conspiracies that lack some of the attributes. The Great Replacement doesn't require coordination or centralization (though people like Soros act as coordinators within their significant spheres of influence). People perpetuating it think that they are doing a good thing, they just stop at the very last step: diversity is good, we are increasing diversity of western countries, but we don't admit that more diverse = less white (which is trivially true, not a snark even) at least not when those racist white people might hear us.

The only conspiracy trait that is really fully present here is that ordinary people are not aware that there are forces working towards a particular end purposefully and industriously, and so will be surprised when that end is achieved. Oh well, most of the conspirators delude themselves about that too.

There's a lot of progressive semi-conspiracies that work like that. One can't help noticing the pattern:

  1. this will not happen

  2. this is not happening

  3. this is happening rarely and for random uncorrelated reasons

  4. this is happening and it's a good thing! (or if it's obviously bad then nobody could've predicted it, also it's a part and parcel of the hustle and bustle).

‘Replacement' reverses the causality between two phenomenas: Natives aren’t having kids, and immigrants are coming in greater numbers. The latter is supported by elites, but in large part because of the former. The emotional salience of the issue, the 'oh no, we're disappearing' realization, also stems from the former. Native reproduction rates is the dominant problem here. “We will not be replaced”’s obvious solution is not "let’s stop immigration", it’s “let’s have more kids”. I’m not a fan of unfiltered immigration, but GRT just externalizes the real problem.

But this is incorrect. Without immigration, native wages and bargaining power would increase, meaning birth rates would increase. Without immigration, the government would need to incentivize births, or consider the real (feminism-related) issues. As is, immigration is the exact thing that the government is using to prevent any real discussion (let alone policy) on birth rates.

native wages and bargaining power would increase, meaning birth rates would increase.

Will native wages increase to the $300K/year level? That's where the U-curve of white American TFR gets above self-replacement levels again; for most of the 95ish percent below that, the correlation between (lifetime) fertility and income ranges from barely positive to greatly negative. Non-white American TFR goes above replacement at a mere $200K/year, but that might be skewed by recent immigrants who haven't yet assimilated to modern American pandas-in-captivity attitudes toward breeding. Even if not, that's probably still above what you're going to hit by just keeping out all the new immigrants.

And remember that, while having fewer poor immigrants increases the bargaining power of native poor people vs people with capital, childcare workers are closer to the poor-people group. It's entirely possible that, while 95% of the population sees their birth rate go down because that's what most modern people do as they make more money, the other 5% might also see their birth rate go down because that's what rich modern people do when they're having more trouble finding a nanny.

the real (feminism-related) issues

The biggest inverse correlation with fertility I've seen is national level of women's education, I'm sad to say, and if there's a version of feminism that manages to break that connection I'd like to see it. But anti-feminism doesn't seem to be immune to modernity either. The LDS church is a literal patriarchy, and Mormon TFR still plummeted, just not quite as soon as that of non-Mormons.

The biggest inverse correlation with fertility I've seen is national level of women's education

The root cause is mechanization. Remember that 1920 and 2020 aren't meaningfully different when you look at TFR compared to the proportion of population that lives in a city- actually, I'd argue that in 1920 it was worse because it was near 2.0 even though the country was 50% rural. We have a ways to go before we get (back) to South Korea/Taiwan TFR.

Women's education is related, but mechanization causes women's education and not the other way around.

This was temporarily reversed in the 1950s and 60s (in the US) because of the post-war economic boom that uniquely benefited male labor, but as soon as that was over (and also that the cheap oil disappeared!) its value went right back into the toilet. And by the time we had cheap energy again, Chinese slaves free trade had permanently displaced those men.

You want to reverse this effect, you need a similar technological shift. AI might get there someday, but it'll need to be a compelling and overwhelming technological force (that somehow survives getting lawfare'd into oblivion; not that lawfare isn't the reason a lot of objectively-unnecessary women are employed to begin with) that devalues their biological advantages so hard that the life path that involves having kids has a better return on investment for the overwhelming majority of women.

The other way is to just go full Handmaiden's Tale, but if you wanted that you have to forsake mechanization (and thus restore the biological advantage human doings have over human beings), and nothing lies that way but ruin: remember, the Spartans lived in fear of a Helot uprising, and given where the power lies in mechanized societies that's why women tend to be hysterical about the possibility of men doing the same thing to them despite the pains they take to make sure they don't.

There's a very tenuous relationship between those things and immigration, if any. It's like saying the elite's opposition to fracking is harming natives' birthrates. I can see the argument, but it's convoluted.

No one is stopping individuals who hyperventilate about their line disappearing from having more kids. You want the government to fuck your wife for you too? Some things you just gotta do yourself.

Very clear relationship, that's why Korea and Japan's strict immigration controls have begotten such a high birthrate.

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