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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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So Georgia Meloni, the supposed far-right firebrand of Italy, is now planning to radically open up visa access for non-EU migrants. PiS in Poland are planning similar measures, even as they've let in record number of workers from moslem-majority countries since they've took power. Of course, the rhetoric from both the Italian and the Poles are all about asylum seekers and illegal migration. Sort of reminds me of GOP rhetoric about stopping people at the border even as they get jawboned by business lobbies to liberalise legal avenues for work visas.

It's the same thing here and it deserves to be pointed out that these fake populists in Europe are ultimately in thrall to the same power system as the old parties are. What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism. Both of those individuals may be colorful but ultimately the driving force is structural.

Of course, my explanation is boring, perhaps even banal, which is why it will never take off. Not enough drama. As for these developments, I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".

Incidentally, when reading about Max Weber's life in recent days, I found out that he was quite nationalistic as a young man and even campaigned against cheap foreign labour (principally from Eastern Europe). Quite ironic for someone who later became a liberal intellectual, but also amusing in that it shows that this thing has been going on for a lot longer than people realise and it likely won't end soon either.

I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate? I will keep repeating, it's at very best just a weak proxy for anything that actually matters. It's really not hard to construct a better proxy: just as literally the first thing that comes to my head, selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want (even if it's still not even close to perfect).

This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism. Such a crazy and bizarre logical jump happening this consistently is really, really suspicious.

Most accurate ≠ most useful.

If I can select from two pools of people, one Asian with an average IQ of 100, one Middle-east/African, with an average IQ of 90, why should I spend time looking for candidates in the group with a lower average IQ?

Hypothetically I might be able to devise a mechanism to accurately sift through both populations that finds 100% of the qualified people from both groups. But given I know one population is just a better pool of candidates there is little utility in going for the lower IQ group so long as the higher IQ group has enough qualified candidates, which it does have. All you are doing is wasting time and effort.

In a real world scenario the situation is abundantly clear. You don't want to waste any time on a worse pool of candidates since your error margins are going to be wider with a pool where the unqualified outnumber the qualified. This error margin is not just relating to work performance but baseline function in society. These errors cost lives and I find it very hard to weigh the alleged 'economic benefit' of mass immigration with descriptions from little girls of how they were gang raped over years, pictures of little children torn to pieces after someone intentionally drove over them in a truck, or descriptions of teenagers tortured to death in their own homelands, that were much safer prior to these 'economic benefits' arriving.

As for your own argumentation, sidelining peoples instincts as racism does little to foster understanding between two differing viewpoints. I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa. I assume you have good intentions and that your tend and befriend instincts are a valuable part of your humanity that has great utility and benefit to those around you. But it's not for a lack of issues that your instincts cause others that I refrain from such insinuations. I'd appreciate if you could do the same.

I think the relevant pro-HBD point here is reversion to the mean; you really should care about what the 'pool' of people you're drawing from looks like, because you'll soon have a new generation that looks as much like them as the parents you cherry-picked.

I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.

Also not a problem if you reject group intelligence differences, of course, which is the official and default stance.

If you select a specific subgroup from a certain ethnic group as immigrants, their descendants will regress to the mean of that subgroup and not their entire ethnic group.

Sure, depending on how you define the subgroup, but if you can figure out a good category-marker that isolates a population with consistent differences in outcomes or measurable cognitive ability, go for it. You might end up cleaving along cultural lines rather than genetic, but if it reproduces in the new environment it's all good.