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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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It’s best to understand this as a completely irrelevant internecine feud between minor dissident right personalities, in this case between Indian Bronson and BAP. These two racial minorities are committed to litigating which of their respective groups is ‘worse’, classics include IB telling a white interlocutor to ‘get replaced’ after a racially charged remark about Indians was made. Apparently they have met each other in real life too. With regards to the Chinese, BAP has decided that Tibetans are noble Bronze Age pagans oppressed by the CCP, and so has a sworn hatred of the Han. It’s all childish nonsense, but so is much of the DR.

That said, it’s obvious to me that large scale Irish and Italian immigration did have a deleterious effect on corruption and graft in American politics, sure, especially in big cities on the East Coast, even if things worked out ‘fine’ in the end.

Twitter feuds like high school, but add 30 iq points

The DR ironically despite being putatively anti-diversity , is very diverse . if it were just limited to WaSPs there would be close to no one.

I definitely took issue with BAP's last post, but I do agree with this one. Why would it be childish nonsense to identify the replacement of the cognitive elite of a civilization with racial foreigners (in 1 or 2 generations no less) as anything other than extremely significant? Can you think of similar events in human history where this happened that were not the result of conquest or colonization?

It's more childish, although more socially acceptable, to pretend like this doesn't matter or mean anything significant because of "meritocracy" or something.

Italians and Irish are European, and they completely assimilated. Identifying the assimilation of European immigrants to bank on the assimilation of non-European immigrants seems childish to me all right... the DR says that there's a racial component to the ability to assimilate. The DR also says that Irish and Italian are European. You say that DR is wrong because the Irish and Italians assimilated, that does not follow.

Blacks did not assimilate. Neither did Jews, their retention of their ethnic particularity continues to be highly significant in American politics, and very arguably detrimental to non-Jewish white people, unlike Italian and Irish identity.

Are Indians and the Chinese going to actually assimilate like the Italians, or are they going to behave more like Jews?

Are Indians and the Chinese going to actually assimilate like the Italians, or are they going to behave more like Jews?

From what I've seen, the Chinese are quite likely to assimilate into the white population as soon as the flow of new immigrants is cut off by the motherland's catastrophically falling birthrates, and tend to be quite politically apathetic relative to their population size outside of issues like college admissions. Even in the event of a war with China I wouldn't expect any sort of large-scale treachery, although if the government tries the whole internment camp thing again and rounds up some Koreans by mistake there will be federal casualties.

Indians on the other hand are both more politically astute (compare Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy to Andrew Yang as presidential candidates) and have multiple overlapping factors holding back complete assimilation i.e. stronger religious traditions (especially for Muslims that demand conversion upon marriage), a tradition of arranged marriages that seems to be making a resurgence among sexually frustrated zoomers, and a larger population reservoir to draw new immigrants from. In that sense Indians are much more like Jews and will likely persist as a distinct and politically salient population for far longer than any East Asian group.

Im not saying that declaring the replacement of much of America’s cognitive elite with Indians significant is wrong (I recall writing a long top-level post that made the argument that it would be significant several years ago). I’m saying that the catfight between IB and BAP is childish, which it absolutely is, along with the babyspeak and many other things.

Italians and Irish are European, and they completely assimilated.

So you really think the US doesn’t look any different if large scale immigration from Ireland and Italy never happened? That seems ridiculously unlikely. And there is still evidence that different white gentile demographics vote differently, and Irish and Italians are still overrepresented by some margin at the top of the Democratic Party compared to other gentile white groups.

As for Jews, non-Orthodox (and the orthodox have less political influence and are more Republican) Jewish American intermarriage rates today substantially exceed those of Irish and Italian Americans in the middle of the last century. You just don’t agree that it’s assimilation because Jewish intermarriage is predominantly with progressive white gentile elites (many indeed of Irish or Italian descent), who obviously don’t share your politics.

Are Indians and the Chinese going to actually assimilate like the Italians, or are they going to behave more like Jews?

Asian Americans have intermarriage rates of about 30%. So maybe? The question is more about the kind of society they’ll assimilate into, since as with the Irish and Italians you can’t replace the people and not replace the country.

Blacks did not assimilate.

As you know, intermarriage is the only true means by which assimilation occurs, and that was banned with great social and legal penalties for the vast majority of American history.

So you really think the US doesn’t look any different if large scale immigration from Ireland and Italy never happened? That seems ridiculously unlikely. And there is still evidence that different white gentile demographics vote differently, and Irish and Italians are still overrepresented by some margin at the top of the Democratic Party compared to other gentile white groups.

I do think the US looks different without large scale immigration from Europe but that's not the question... I would mark "assimilation" not as there are no longer any demographic correlations but as their identity not being salient in culture or politics. Some families identify on a surface-level as Italian or Irish as family lore or aesthetic, but it's not a salient part of the American political struggles. This is in sharp contrast with Jewish identity which continues to be an extremely salient component of political and cultural life.

You just don’t agree that it’s assimilation because Jewish intermarriage is predominantly with progressive white gentile elites (many indeed of Irish or Italian descent), who obviously don’t share your politics.

I think my definition of assimilation as the identity no longer has saliency in political or cultural struggles works here. Look at the CW thread, issues of Jewish identity and advocacy come up all the time (and it's not entirely my fault for that either). They are politically, culturally, geopolitically extremely significant. Do we get to look forward to Asians and Indians behaving the same as Jews, retaining an intense identification with their actual (and not even fake) homelands and ethnicities?

Asian Americans have intermarriage rates of about 30%. So maybe?

I won't pretend to be able to predict the outcomes of the impending Hapa ethnogenesis, but early results do not at all look promising. What I will say is that this is monumentally more significant than the integration of European groups which are all much more similar to each other than any of them is to Asian populations.

It's almost comical because all of this shows how correct the DR's model of the world is.

European groups come to America. They retain demographic differences but assimilate into the White identity of the nation.

How can any reasonable person possibly compare that to the impending Hapa ethnogenesis? We aren't even talking about assimilation, we're talking about ethnogenesis. It's also fair to relate the assimilation of European groups as a white ethnogenesis.

That's why this is all more significant than childish loyalties to a non-existent "meritocracy." The real question is the question of ethnogenesis and its civilizational implications, and it's only the DR that actually appreciates that.