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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Or, more likely in a European context, making sure robots don't provide a reason to halt the flow of infinity migrants into Europe.

Europe- or at least Europe’s elites- doesn’t seem to actually a flow of infinity bomalians. They don’t really know how to stop it- as it turns out there is no magic ‘stay in your home country’ button.

No doubt you’ll point out that everyone in Hungary is Hungarian, at least in the sense that they actually belong there. But the migrants don’t actually want to go to Hungary anyway; they want to go to Germany or a Nordic country(or the UK), because while Hungary might be a nicer place to live than anywhere in Africa, and the vast majority of the Middle East, it’s a lot less nice of a place to live compared to the countries north and west of it. My understanding of the Hungarian immigration crackdown was that it was more of a ‘no, fuck you, you take them’ when Germany tried to make immigration to the EU less appealing by declaring that fake refugees would be distributed around the EU instead of going to the country of their choice. Basically the same thing Greg Abbott is doing in Texas, because making migrants take a slightly different route is fairly doable(and this is what Texas has actually done; migrants are now crossing in the other three border states instead).

Eurocrats, no doubt, have options for dealing with mass migration that they’ve taken off the table. Some of those options are rooted in ideological beliefs that have nothing to do with ‘infinity browns is awesome’, like ‘muh international norms and treaties’ and some of those are rooted in practical concerns, coordinating border security over dozens of countries is not actually very easy. But that doesn’t mean the EU is firmly committed to having an infinite flow of third worlders coming in! They’re not the US(where democrats at least seem to genuinely have a commitment to infinity bomalians or whatever). Certainly, the EU isn’t going out of its way to invite in more migrants.

There is, in fact, not a flow of infinity migrants into Europe, and this increased regulation of AI is happening at the same time as increased regulation of migration in EU generally at the EU level.

It's certainly not the way I'd word it, but I think that "infinity migrants" does capture something about how this is treated in mainstream discourse. Does European leadership have an actual end state where all of this is going to lead to in mind, a certain ratio of natives:immigrants where they'll close down the borders? I don't think so. Instead, there is a vague sense that immigration is good and that, as long as people are willing to come, we should continually take in a significant number, whether on moral or economic grounds. At least that's how I'd describe most European political organizations from the center leftward on this topic.

I'm now old enough that I can remember three distinct phases of a few months to maybe a year where politicians were making migration-skeptic noises and sometimes even went through with some measures that mildly decreased the inflow for a while (like the recent border police controls here in Germany). These were triggered by momentary increases in the number of arrivals or terrorist attacks. Of course, these phases came and went and in the meanwhile, the numbers go up and up, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but always up. Infinity is an exaggeration, but it's the direction things are and have been going towards for all of living memory.

You keep saying that and it plainly contradicts the evidence of my own eyes, I'm literally passing tens of African boys on my way back from work every day (they're not causing trouble as far as I can tell, they seem to be playing football most of the day). There's two different parts of Europe I watched fill up with "refugees" in a similar manner. The "increased regulation of migration" seems to boil down to locking them up in hopes they'll stop coming, a policy that is obviously unsustainable as per your own article.

Immigrants are, in fact, still coming, and the EU is, in fact, doing very little to stop it.

Yes, of course there are migrants coming. No-one has denied that. That's different from the dumb catchphrase "infinity migrants", let alone the implication that EU is specifically regulating AI to facilitate immigration.

I don't know what being literal is supposed to bring into the conversation. His claim is that Europe has the goal of continuing mass immigration, you claim here, and in other comments, that actually they are clamping down, I'm claiming that they're not, and they're measures are symbolic at best. Do you agree or disagree with that? Debating current state of immigration is somewhat interesting, debating the literal meaning of a culture-warry comment that got modded is not.

AI will kill off white collar and beurocrat jobs first. Surprise surprise - guess which ones are protected in the legislation. No one is banning strawberry picking and roofing robots.

You’ve been making a habit of hyperbole when it comes to the culture war. Please resist the urge to cast your enemies as cartoon villains.