This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Canada’s decline
Things are not going well in Canada. The hashtag #Canadaisbroken has been going around for a while, but the scale of the decline remains underdiscussed, especially in our media. Canada’s real GDP per capita is 2.5% lower now than it was in 2019. In the U.S. its 6.0% higher. For decades, Canada has had per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power) that was about 80% of the U.S. level, now its 72% and falling. Canada is rapidly becoming a European country in terms of living standards. This understates the problem because in Europe its easier to live on less: cars are not necessary in many places and, crucially, rent is much lower. Canada is in the midst of an unbelievable housing crisis. At current prices and interest rates, the ownership costs of a typical home would consume 60% of the median household's income, the highest ever recorded. I went to the U.S. southwest recently and my overriding impression is how much better off America is than Canada now.
The Liberal government’s response to this has been deficit spending. Their lack of fiscal responsibility was dramatic during Covid, but hidden under the guise of emergency they spent $200+ billion on new entitlements and spending programs which has resulted in Canada running a permanent structural budget deficit. When combined with our provinces (which unlike U.S. states are allowed to borrow) and measured as a % of GDP, the country is running Bush Jr.-tier fiscal deficits without wars. And what are these new programs? Almost all of them are means-tested benefits for behaviours progressives like. A new daycare program aimed at moms working 9-5 jobs (i.e. white collar) that does nothing for SAHMs, a dental care program which is only for families making under 90k (creating a huge marriage penalty and implicit tax rate), a carbon tax rebate which is income redistribution in disguise, replacing the modest but universal child benefit with a generous means tested one, etc. If you put it together, Canada has largely rebuilt our 1970s welfare state but will claw it back from you more than dollar for dollar as you earn more. We variously incentivize poverty and moms to work, stay unmarried and put their kids in daycare. Our taxes are high.
The other big push from our government is immigration. They occasionally frame it as a way to stop inflation, but usually they don’t defend it at all and assume the pro-immigration consensus is unshakable. The levels were shocking last year, but they keep rising. Over just the past 3 months, Canada admitted 430,000 new people. Canada now has an absolute annual level of legal immigration (including temporary migration) of about 1.2 million -- higher than the United States. We get about 500,000 traditional immigrants, but the big change from recent years is about 700,000 net “non-permanent residents” who form a new helot class. Canada now has 2.5 million temporary residents who come to study or work low-paid jobs and it has rapidly transformed the entire country. These people represent 6% of the population, but because they are highly concentrated by age, they are about 20% of adults aged 20-40. I spend time in a small town that is hundreds of kilometers from any major city and nearly every store now employs temporary foreign workers from India. Every worker at McDonalds. Every worker at Tim Hortons. They live 6+ to an apartment and have tightened the rental market pricing locals out. With population growth running at its highest ever pace, homebuilding is unchanged at about 250,000 units creating an incremental housing need of a quarter million units per year. Rent inflation is over 7% compared with approximately 0% month over month in the US.
What the past few years has made plain to me is how deep leftism runs in Canada and how dedicated it is to ignoring the effect of incentives on behaviour: We can just subsidize bad behaviour and punish good behaviour endlessly without actually changing behaviour. In many ways Canada is running on the fumes of vestigial British earnestness, politeness and self discipline which has made this work in the past, but I think we’re rapidly burning up our cultural capital and once its gone, I think we’ll tip into a much worse equilibrium. I have leftist friends whose perspective is: “sure things aren’t great, but would the conservatives do better?” which makes me sad. For most people, even smart people like my friends, seeing the bad consequences of things they support doesn’t move the needle at all in terms of their worldviews. And I didn’t get into spiraling crime and government celebration of the deracination of our traditional culture.
I think part of what is happening is Anglo culture’s seemliness has become our greatest weakness. Its unseemly to ‘punch down’ and blame an avalanche of mostly-poor international students for the rental market, or permissive and ‘anti-racist’ criminal justice policy for a huge increase in crime so we equivocate and people say things like “its so brutal, how sad” while continuing to vote in the same way. There is no transmission from failure in office to electoral results, so we end up with people like Trudeau for three terms. One astute observation I’ve heard about Canadian ‘niceness’ is that its fake: people are very cagey about saying what they think in public about anything controversial. Our entire country is a university campus. Canadians live in a world of feel good pablum as our way of life is destroyed. People rage about it, but there is no honest sensemaking apparatus in Canada – because talking about things plainly is unseemly – so rage is dissipated randomly. Even today, even after its failures, the combined polling share of the LPC-led ruling coalition (i.e. LPC+NDP) is nearly 50%.
Canada deserves all this. The rod of consequences is a very effective teacher for those on whom the voice of reason has no effect. Canada decided as a country to subsidize shitty behaviour by taking from the productive class and did not listen when they were told this would lead to fewer productive people (relative to the counterfactual) and more shitty behaviour and proceeded with their misguided idea regardless.
Now they are eating the consequences of their beliefs as they have fewer productive people (lower real GDP per capita) as well as more shitty behaviour (no citation needed) and I have nothing to say other than "You deserve it" and a sincere wish they get it given to them good and hard.
Was it the country, the nation or the government that made this decision?
In Britain voters have consistently demanded lower immigration for 20 years and governments (on both sides) have consistently ignored them and raised immigration, or refused to enforce borders. Australia has proven that it is possible to reduce illegal immigration to zero for island countries (if this was ever in doubt). Governments have the power to prevent these things, it's not difficult. They choose not to prevent illegal immigration, they choose not to set quotas on legal migration - the people tend to be pretty happy with such notions.
I don't know if the Canadian people ever got a clear choice, I suspect not if the British didn't.
Voters in Britain apparently considered it to not be a sufficiently important issue to vote for a different party over. There is a clear enough choice: you can continue voting for the parties that made it clear in word and deed that they want more immigration, or you can vote for literally any other parties, or you can start your own.
What are they supposed to do when their major parties both say 'oh we'll lower immigration' and then raise it? They voted for Brexit, many thinking this would finally reduce immigration and it still didn't.
https://twitter.com/t848m0/status/1560662923101347840
When the major parties, NGO blob, big companies and the bulk of the media have a consensus to increase immigration it's difficult to start new parties and move against them, let alone to actually get into govt and implement policies.
You seem to be painting a picture where the problem is basically that voters are too stupid (to see through lies and avoid repeatedly being fooled, or pay attention when the proponents of Brexit make it clear that they aren't actually against immigration) and helpless (to build their own institutions and political parties, or even "just" start a revolution) to get their preferences satisfied. At that point, it's hard to even invoke something like a social contract for why politicians should heed voter interests in this matter, since a contract implies a deal which implies some sort of mutual benefit and evidently there is no detriment to politicians from defecting; and all that you can appeal to is some sort of slave-morality pity or obligation towards their inferiors. Wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, etc.
They're not stupid, they (rightfully) get apathetic about the prospect of achieving change through electoral politics when they face a myriad of manufactured legal/political constraints to achieving their goals. This leads to much less trust in the government and less national cohesion. On the whole, the Brexit campaign was associated with future immigration reduction, this is the broad essence of what was communicated. It's very hard to argue against this:
That the Brexiteers didn't formally promise to reduce immigration afterwards does not remove from the fact that the referendum was about reduction of immigration as far as voters were concerned. And putting communications to one side, Brexit was a necessary prerequisite to preventing immigration, EU had freedom of movement.
They'll have lots of fun with a population that instinctively resists their policies and distrusts their leaders. I'm eager to see how they fill the ranks of the grossly understrength British Army in this climate. Do they think people are going to make any sacrifices for their country, when it is not their country?
Politicians aren't wolves, they're fat cats who rely on the increasingly grudging consent of the governed. Haven't you read the hundred million articles complaining about the decline of democratic ideology, trust in government, populism, political radicalism, misinformation, conspiracy theories? This has severe longterm consequences for the sustainability of the system, it induces fragility.
If you are being lied to repeatedly, but still continue believing what you are told, that seems like a pretty canonical indicator of insufficient brainpower, informally known as stupidity. Your subsequent quote also further confirms that Brexit voters voted for Brexit because they expected it to lead to a reduction in immigration. If being able to predict the consequences of your actions is not a measure of intelligence, then what is?
I mean, the first half of your post, put in the context of everything that happened before Brexit (and I'm sure that any attentive participant of the political system can show me a long list of instances of the electorate being deceived since the dawn of democracy), seems to suggest that the population is actually quite credulous and trusting of their leaders despite everything. At the moment Labour seems to be leading in polls, but I'm sure that if they get elected and screw up in some way power will revert to the Tories. Clearly there is no sufficient distrust to make people do something as drastic as vote third or rather fourth party, or do anything else that would reveal a preference for not continuing in the same way and deferring to the same leaders. I doubt politicians will lose many nights of sleep over people saying in TV interviews that they don't trust them and will resist their policies, as long as those people reliably keep paying their taxes, spinning in the hamster wheel, obeying the laws and voting for them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, if there's a secret amount of people who's #1 view is cut immigration, then just like w/ UKIP, an anti-immigration party should be able to run and effect politics the same way UKIP got moderate globalist David Cameron to OK a Brexit referendum.
The UK is a different animal than the US when it comes to minor parties.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The OP's comment suggests that nobody is really learning anything from where things are heading, thus, it's unlikely anyone's going to update hard once things accelerate out of control.
If you take a look at the top posts on /r/Canada right now, we have:
I didn't cherry-pick these. That's what's at front of mind for a lot of Canadians right now, as best I can tell, and I think people have already updated. If you look at the polls, the Conservative party has shot up to a clear projected majority starting in about September of this year.
/r/canada is not at all representative of the typical Canadian. It has the standard bias of most subreddits in being predominantly young, male, and left-wing, but it's also selected for being strongly anti-immigration. In fact, it's been absolutely obsessed with the issues of housing and immigration for the last few years. This goes back way before the pandemic or the housing crisis.
Years ago, it came out that one of the mods of /r/canada had some sympathy for white nationalism, and there was a big protest resulting in him and some other mods resigning and the creation of /r/onguardforthee, to which everyone who thought /r/canada was irredeemably racist fled, It's pretty popular and is now a more left-wing version of /r/canada that is much less opposed to immigration.
If you look at the top six posts there you have:
Only one about housing and not one about immigration. Some Canadians are definitely thinking about this, but that's not new for most of them, and as often as you see people on /r/canada blame immigrants, they'll blame things like foreign and corporate homebuyers and AirBnb.
The Conservatives have not said they would reduce immigration rate. Their support is due to something else. One cannot overstate how much of a bubble /r/canada is.
More options
Context Copy link
A couple months ago I took this screenshot of the-then top posts for that day in /r/canada. Was an effective summary of the malaise we're in
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's the amazing thing about consequences: It doesn't even matter if these people are so obstinate they refuse to budge when the rod comes down on their back. All that will happen is that the rod will start to come down harder and harder, until they recant or it breaks their back and a different, hopefully more in touch with reality, group comes into power whence the cycle will begin again.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can well believe that Canada decided to subsidize shitty behavior by taxing good behavior. This question is more out of curiosity than a challenge- how exactly did Canada do this in a more egregious manner than other first world countries with their eg single motherhood benefits.
Imagine if 20-30% of Americans were french people explicitly voting with the goal of making things worse for the English?
This isn't a charicature. a top 5 issue for Quebecers is "Climate Change" which is code for shutting down Alberta's oil, and carbon taxing Car Centric Ontario and Western communities for the crime of having to go to work... They will openly say this. Quebec politicians will say as much in French.
Living in this country has made me incredible sympathetic to everygroup that ever concluded ethnic cleansing or ethno-nationalism was the only option, when you live in a truely multi-ethnic/multi-lingual country (where there are actually mutiple groups not just a mass of "Diverse" urbanite) Everything the other ethnic group wants, votes for, advocates very quickly becomes "And the other ethnicity is going to pay for it, and we're going to hurt them extra so they can't resist as much next time"
A Canada comprised of only the 9 english provinces would be no more screwed up than US blue states without large black populations: a collection of Vermonts, Oregons, and Maines and Minosotas.
It's when you add in the weight of 20% of the population being French and there being a deep core of openly hostile Euro-left wing belief that pretty much despises everything the functionally American English Canadians value or aspire to that you get a Canada as fucked up as this is.
I, a frog, would wish to team up with you on a peaceable separation campaign.
Federalists on either side are wretched people.
I'm touched.
There is so much Quebec could have been and could have built instead of being a land of government subsidy its unreal.
Allegedly Quebec has massive amounts of resources that just sit barren because developing them and revitalizing the communities near them would result in equalization clawbacks
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Here in the US we have the same hair-shirt environmentalists, you just can't tell them by their accents.
More options
Context Copy link
Why doesn't Quebec just.. you know, leave? Someone else said that in Canada the provinces still (maybe?) have the right to secede. What's keeping Quebec in Canada if they hate it so much?
Quebec gets massively subsidized by western Canada, just like the maritimes.
As an independentist, what you're saying is true but irrelevant. People are fully economically illiterate, there is nothing close to a popular consciousness that we'd hurt from missing those transfers. We expect short-term economic injury from the turmoil, but that's pretty much it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The rest of Canada seems to overwhelmingly want Quebec to stay, and I'd assume that they and their representatives and elites are engaging in plentiful propaganda and lobbying for this (surely the Quebec independence movement is not propagandising unopposed?). In fact I can't think of any instance of a nation being in favour of getting rid of a minority along with the territory they occupy, no matter how vexatious; being big and relevant is evidently one hell of a drug.
Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia due to ethnic tensions.
Also the South African Bantustans, but that was half-assed and no other country recognized them so they ultimately gave up.
I think your question is complicated by the border between ‘troublesome ethnic group’ and ‘terrorist campaign’ being pretty muddy.
More options
Context Copy link
The bantustans weren't the territory they occupied, they were tiny enclaves with no resources.
Like allowing wheeling west Virginia to secede, then forcibly granting all citizenship there, and therefore removing their rights as us citizens even though they actually reside in NYC or California.
Equally, Malaysia probably wouldn't have expelled Singapore if it weren't for England(and big ol uncle Sam) lurking in the background preventing genocide.
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, thanks. Those are interesting examples.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's the same reason places like Romania want to be part of the EU. Financially, Quebec has a really good deal with Canada, and they have a great deal of autonomy already. Separating wouldn't be easy either. A lot of constitutional issues would have to be sorted out and the last two times they held a vote, they lost.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, it's not an actual majority position, just a sizeable minority. To the extent that there was a 90+% turnout referendum in 1995 that came out to a 50.6/49.4% split for stay/leave. It's lower than that now. You can get a lot more concessions by threatening to leave than actually doing it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am sure that if you asked the French, they would tell you with the same sincerity that the English are keeping them down and do not let them breathe.
This was common discourse during the end times of Soviet Union too. The Russians complained that they are feeding the non-Russians, the non-Russians cried that the Russians are sucking their blood. All were persuaded that if only they became "independent", all their problems would be solved and they would live like in Hollywood movie.
As history shows, things happened otherwise.
Go ahead, play Yugoslavian games and win Yugoslavian prizes. The world can always enjoy some more exciting war footage and cool atrocity videos.
On the other hand, Czechia and Slovokia seem to have done OK with their split.
I've never seen any evidence the Czech's and Slovak's hated each other, though. It was a marriage of post-WWI convenience that they both happily agreed to break, because there was no greater heritage to fight over, and the two groups seemed equal. OTOH, the Wallonians and Flemish seemingly despise one another, because they both feel ownership of what can be described as Belgium or whatever. Funny how there's probably thousands of descendants of Flemish and Walloon immigrants from 200 years ago who in the US are married, friends, and neighbors, and don't give a crap about any of that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are you confident that other countries without those single motherhood benefits, such as the US, have lower rates of single motherhood than Canada? Because I don't think that's true even controlling for race. I'm sure cheaper daycare has an effect on the margin, but I'm skeptical that if Canada elected a clean Conservative slate and abolished the entirety of their welfare system that all the problems OP gestures at would evaporate. Even leaving aside the new problems generated as a consequence.
The USA also has single mother benefits, my point was that subsidizing terrible decisions by taxing good behavior isn’t unique to Canada and I’m asking for clarification on how Canada doing this is uniquely destructive in ways that eg America and the Netherlands aren’t doing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link