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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Amazing to describe a bunch of Asians and Indians making $300K+ at Amazon and Microsoft as “incapable of maintaining American civilization.”

Aside from Bezos, Nadella has probably done more than anyone for property values in Seattle in the last 10 years.

The homeless are definitely a problem but it’s more fixable than this mindset of racial division that both you and the DEI people preach.

These people belong to civilizations that have existed for longer than the West has been the West.

But you are missing the point. They can maintain their own social structures and idioms, but can't maintain Western ones. Only Westerners can do that by definition.

I think Gobineau goes too far when he says that "civilization is incommunicable" as some individuals can clearly be assimilated, but collectively he is right. If you swapped out Western and Eastern elites in an instant, neither society would be able to function correctly anymore.

The racial division you bemoan is the cause of much disarray, but it is also the consequence of a multicultural society that has refused to impose a common culture in the name of Liberal ideals. And as we can see, economic success cannot alone mend this gap, only paper over it.

Eastern countries with homeless people are those that are very poor in comparison with the US. Rich Asian countries like Singapore do not have a homeless problem whatsoever. None of the countries have psychotic and aggressive homeless.

The homeless pathology of big American cities is totally unique and there's simply no way to explain it by blaming Asians. Especially since the voters and government is mostly white people - the "swapping" you talk about is a figment.

I'm taking this swap as an hypothetical to illustrate the social upheaval that is created by radically altering the makeup of a society over a short period of time. The UAE, Singapore, these are multicultural societies that are successful and orderly. They also require a great deal of authority and legitimacy to maintain.

This, in turn, require long lasting institutions that are either a monopoly of a specific ethnic group or the product of ruthless objective competition, which is essentially the same as it synthesizes a bureaucrat class that becomes its own ethnos (see China).

Without this chain, you get South Africa.

Now if you decide to understand pointing out this reality as "blaming Asians", I'm afraid that's on you.

The "radically altered makeup" of Seattle has precious little to do with this considering that it's whites who are most enamored with pro homeless politics.

Singapore's parliament is a mix of Indians, Chinese, and Malays. It's not a homogeneous elite and in a (de facto) one party state there's not much objective competition to get on the ballot.

in a one party State there's not much competition to get on the ballot

Look I understand you've been taught that your political formula does this in school, but there's very little reason to believe this is true. In fact I'm more ready to consider Aristotle when he argues the opposite is true.

I think it requires a lot more intelligence and studying to become a civil servant in Singapore than in Seattle. And indeed that this is how it's elite self selects in lieu of ethnic preference.

Civil servant? We're talking about elected positions. Please post the objective requirements to get elected in Singapore.

We're talking about elected positions.

No we're not, we're talking about the ruling elite, which is not the same thing.

You can't vote the elite of a society out of power. The people who run things, make actual policy decisions are rarely the same people that nominally have the power to do so. I don't like this as a formalist myself but it's just a fact of life.

I mean come on, do you really think Joe Biden runs the United States? That Vladimir Putin decides things on his own without large constraints from his stakeholder's interests?

If we're going to have a serious discussion about the sociocultural dynamics of how a society functions we first have to agree to basic Machiavellian premises. There's an infinite amount of fictional stories you can tell yourself about what's going on, if we don't ground ourselves in pragmatic, value free analysis of power, this conversation is pointless.

What does Joe Biden have to do with crazy hobos in Seattle?

The elected officials of Seattle do not object to the status quo and do not promise any changes. The voters of Seattle do not mind and continue to elect those officials. There's no need to invoke Machiavellian epicycles when the elected officials and electorate are in total agreement on the issue.

It's not the "deep city hall" that keeps the hobos on the street, it's the vox populi.

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