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FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
This issue (freedom to speak, share and view anything, including seedy content, on the internet, regardless of what the state thinks of it – and "payment processors" are the government by another name, considering the existing interlinkages and their monopolistic market share) in particular both infuriates me like no other, and somehow makes me understand and even sympathize with libs' thinking on immigration.
What's your stance on CSAM? Do you bite the bullet or break out the carveout knife?
If you bite the bullet, you are unelectable, as all but the lizardman's constant disagree strongly with you. You have principles, and zero access to power.
If you provide a carveout, you have no principles, and we are in fact just haggling over the price.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
if a society degenerates and fails because it can't handle that type of freedom, then it morally deserved to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly
What if it turns out that no society can "handle that type of freedom"? Then does the entire human species "deserve to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly"?
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
I found it quite telling the moment trump decapitated USAID all the usual lock step nonsense from mass US media went all over the place, they were like chickens flailing around after decapitation without a unified purpose. Maybe trump also managed to find and pull the plug on some unnamed psyops division? Idk, I don't read reddit anymore but we do know its swarming with glowies literally on the military's payroll, so why not the rest of the internet. How much of the woke hysteria on twitter and tumblr was organic.
Tractatus
1d ago
"America, like most other advanced economies, has functionally full employment and a lot of blue collar jobs left unfilled. Japan, Poland, etc are doing the same thing."
A blatant lie, easily disproven merely by opening one's eyes. One does not get the millions of fentanyl deaths, the hollowed out Rust Belt, nor the millions upon millions drowning in debt because they literally can't make enough. Nor, for that matter, would you see the H1B shenanigans as employers post tech jobs exclusively in foreign papers, to try and find a loophole around posting requirements.
Good joke putting Japan in there, btw. A nation with employment stats more fraudulent than the US is hard to find, but Japan is up to the challenge, just straight up defining homelessness out of existence. Sorry, but no amount of sophistry is going to get me to pretend that a girl turning tricks to earn enough money to stay at an internet cafe for the night is not, in fact, homeless.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
I kind of understand them, gypsies love doing that shit when they immigrate. Suddenly they are romanian or serbian or whatever.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
You used the word pejoratively; it would not make sense as a moral argument justification if it were used in the purely descriptive sense that you now claim.
Yes it would. Or, to put it another way, I meant it in the objective sense of "if you don't comply, the government will send men with guns after you". I don't know what to tell you. There is of course a kind of implicit pejorative there, in that hurting people is wrong in a vacuum. But like anyone sensible, I recognize that violence can be justified in many cases, to prevent a greater evil. The state having the theoretical authority to use violence, and wielding it as a threat to prevent more chaos and suffering, is one such case. This is all pretty basic stuff.
The moral argument brought forward by pro-immigration extremists (when they are not outright anarchists who reject the premise that state violence is ever justified) is that the harm caused to immigrants by repression efforts is greater than any harm runaway immigration could cause. This is a dumb position and checked out from reality. But it has nothing to do with "pejorative redefinitions". It's just an extremely biased analysis with regards to the harms and benefits on both sides. A coherent anti-immigration argument still has to acknowledge that at some level you're saying "were an illegal to ignore all warnings and come anyway, there comes a point where we would physically shove, hit, or shoot that guy until he was no longer on our side of the border". Such an argument simply involves saying that the benefits of such a policy outweigh the minor moral cost of that violence.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Is Count gone for good? I hated hating Turok but loved hating Count.
NYTReader
1d ago
Of course the WSJ is sympathetic to the Koreans; it's a liberal and immigration friendly paper. What does that matter? The article states that foreigners are moving in and the population of the natives is going down. I would characterize this as demographic replacement through immigration.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
OK, I see your point. I guess there is some turning afoot. Makes me feel doubly weird though - first time because I'm not used to UK policies being less insane than US ones, usually it goes the other way in my experience. The second time because the stance of "trans women are men, but you go to jail if you say it without government approval" is still completely insane, just in a different way - now we have a choice between the clown would where a man can become a woman just by saying it, and the clown world where a man can force you to say he's a woman, under the threat of government prosecution, even though the same government does not think it's true - so you are officially forced to lie.
Corvos
1d ago
Maybe. The numbers show that the economics aren’t working in Europe, and various parties have turned against it. Even the Left wing in the UK is nominally against it though for various of the reasons stated it hasn’t actually done very much.
Whether this is downstream of the economics not working out or other factors is hard to say.
Syphax
1d ago
I agree. As in most things, the situation for wokeness went bad at first slowly after 2020, then very fast. My purely vibes based reading is that we're only months into the very fast part. We'll see what mutation replaces it.
I mean the term purely descriptively; it's how the business of government happens.
You used the word pejoratively; it would not make sense as a moral argument justification if it were used in the purely descriptive sense that you now claim.
This involves a threat, either explicit or implicit, of physical violence if they don't comply. That's just how it works.
This line of argument has no limiting factor, and can apply as much to any interaction.
This internet interaction has an implicit possiblity of violence if certain boundaries are not obliged, since you could always turn to internet sleuths or hackers and seek to harm me if I annoyed you enough, or vice versa. Anyone weaker than you could infer an implicit threat of physical violence if they disagreed with you. Even people not weaker than you, but less interested in a topic, could take the firmness of your position as an implicit threat.
Fortunately, actual violence does not work that way, and neither do sound moral arguments resort to categorical pejorative redefinitions.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1d ago
The standard vocabulary dogma is that between male and female is intersex, and between man and woman (or boy and girl) is nonbinary.
Tiber727
1d ago
A better analogy, but still flawed. Everyone agrees that male and female exist (though I suppose there's room there when talking about nonbinary). However the left has has turned the desire to be acknowledged and respected into an obsession, something to be asserted rather than established. And the easiest way to do that is to do something loud yet easily packaged. It's not "I think therefore I am," it's "I act therefore I am." They aren't so much trying to force you to acknowledge a god, they're trying to get you to acknowledge them as a unique person by making you acknowledge how they act.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The least fertile demographic in the world is parsis, I believe. Koreans are like, fourth or fifth- behind some not-technically-a-country groups like manchurians.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
You said in place of. What's your evidence for that? I just distinguished between addition and replacement.
I don't have a Wall Street Journal subscription, so I can't read the article itself, but I would be very shocked if the WSJ was pushing a line about demographic replacement - especially since the portions you've quoted sound sympathetic to the Koreans.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think most of it is just economic, to be honest. The two-party consensus is that large-scale immigration is necessary for economic reasons - more workers enable more economic growth, and it fills out the bottom of the population pyramid, which is declining due to demographic transition. (For non-conspiratorial reasons - no one's scheming to reduce the native birthrate, and in fact the birthrate decline is global.)
When asked, neither party usually says that's the reason, though if pressed they will usually mention it as one among others, but I think it's the core reason and most of the rest is rationalisation.
NYTReader
1d ago
It's spelled out in the article. Foreign food, foreign languages, and foreign customs are becoming dominant in place of the native white population.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
The unpopularity of the Democrats is part of Klein's point, though. Their own base is unhappy with them, it seems partly because they are not perceived as doing enough to fight or to interfere with Trump's agenda.
And... they would seem to have a reasonable mandate to do that. Opposition parties are, in fact, supposed to oppose the government party and hold it responsible. The Democratic members of congress have obligations to represent the people who elected them and to make decisions that they perceive as in the interests of the country as a whole. The American constitutional system does not ask representatives to shut up and roll over just because the president is from a different party.
I don't think a government shutdown is a good idea myself, or a good move for Democrats, but Democrats absolutely should use the positions they have to do things that their voters want, or that they think is good for the country, and both those principles mean opposing some of what the government is doing.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
You're going to have to spell that out for me.
Koreans, really? It's demographic replacement by the least fertile demographic in the world?
At any rate, it's not clear to me that addition constitutes replacement.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
I believe that the problem is Blues; if it were possible to coordinate with Blacks and Browns against them, that would be an entirely acceptable outcome. Browns and Blacks are a problem to the degree they empower Blues; if blue power is broken, disputes with blacks and browns are solvable in any number of ways.
I hope it's not to low effort for me to say thank you for expressing this, and doing so in such a clear manner. It sums up not just my disagreement with some people online, but also with some people I know IRL, because we are in agreement here, and they're at the "the problem is blacks and browns, and wish that Reds and Blues could coordinate against them" position.
(It's related to why I argue eugenics is still a deeply Progressive position, and tend to reference Confucians on social inequality.)
Now overlap a net immigration chart on that. And then add an immigration / GDP chart of the US for comparison, and added effect.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
Poland wasn't doing better to begin with, though.
That's the whole point. All these countries started in roughly the same place.
I wasn't making a moral defense of Klein, I think his behavior speaks for itself. But I think you're underselling just how many people have these same beliefs. Most people don't care and/or instinctively side with Klein (or know they should if they know what's good for them).
In this environment, this behavior can work or fill an important niche. Who is more likely to get a say in polite circles? Some Vox writer posting about an exciting study on some teaching intervention that showed IQ improvements or a more Murrayist take?
I don't think you give Klein enough credit. He is a higher class of commentator than Seder. He reads. By his own account he has read and reviewed Murray, and at least knows Murray is for UBI:
Because Klein is cleverer than Seder he can see that Murray is offering a poisoned chalice. Vox is about enhancing the arguments of left-wingers so they can advance their agenda. Focusing on the short-term gain of having Republicans agree with you on one program when it undercuts the central pillars of that agenda would be deeply unwise. Social constructionism is far more useful to Klein than Murray's tactical (in his mind) retreat. Setting up a test that could obviate the need for any left-wing policy by attacking the basic assumptions is also incredibly unwise.
Klein doesn't want to cut social spending. Klein doesn't believe that such spending cannot solve persistent problems or that the government should accept that it can at best ameliorate some human capital gaps. Why would he want to? The alternate thesis is what allows his side to accrue power and, hopefully, fix problems. What's Vox's reason for being if the answer is that there's no clever move to be made, let's just stop people starving?
Harris understandably had no patience for engaging in the discussion given how the conversation started, but Klein basically states that not moving towards a more socialist and redistributive position when citing these facts is itself suspect:
Believing in HBD is itself bad, but using it to cut state spending...beyond the pale.
Murray seems to be the Bart Ehrman of intelligence research. Attacked because he's prominent, but there is also an incentive to make it a lot more about him than may be necessary, since it gives a certain view a convenient avatar to attack and to thus marginalize amongst your audience by proxy.
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