domain:asteriskmag.com
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1m ago
I think at the core the real problem is that no universal arguments are actually possible in these spaces, and it really is who / whom all the way down. I'm not saying that to say Yglesias is arguing in bad faith; I mean, instead, that I think he believes something about universal arguments that simply doesn't work. Ironically, the argument I'm about to make might get slotted into an intersectional, post-modern, identity politics one these days, except on impermissible lines.
But let me make an analogy. I have a friendly acquaintance who has a PhD in English. Really clever and funny guy. And, importantly for this story, he's a not especially rabid or antagonistic atheist of Russian Jewish descent. And at some point, a decade ago, we were at a barbeque, and he was talking about the time that he had spent, earlier in his academic career, in a university in northern Utah. Obviously a very homogenous, very LDS part of the country. And at some point, he made some joke in passing about how stiflingly and uncomfortably Mormon the whole place was, but fortunately "we" had managed to get a lot of Supreme Court rulings that were making being that way much less possible in public, "we" were half way there, and "we" just needed another batch of Supreme Court rulings to finish the job and make it possible for "normal" people to move there and not be hassled by the religiously homogenous. I want to say immediately that 1) he said this in a somewhat wry way, and 2) the "we" he was clearly referring to, and that he assumed I was an unobjectionable part of, was "smart, cosmopolitan, well-educated progressives". He didn't have a particular strong atheist or Jewish identity, as far as I could tell (and in the best of progressive Jewish fashion, he married a progressive Catholic woman later).
And on the one hand, I can totally imagine that, for a clever, wry, atheist academic of Russian Jewish extraction from New England, being in homogenous LDS communities would be pretty alienating. And I could totally imagine seeing progress, for such a person, as being synonymous with dampening all possible public expressions of homogenous, assumed religiosity. And from that view point, mass immigration especially, along with progressive public schools and university educations and Hollywood narrative promulgation, are all unabashed goods, creating a more comfortable, more desirable world.
But as a matter of fact, much of my extended family is true believing LDS, some of it out west, and I'm very, very familiar with the LDS stories of their founding, and the religious persecution they faced early on, and the incredible lengths they went to and sacrifices they made to carve out space to live out their own values and their own beliefs. And if the actual criteria for universal progress in America is "to what extent can a wry progressive academic atheist of Russian Jewish extraction move anywhere in the country and always feel comfortable", as far as I'm concerned, that's equivalent to saying, "we all must agree that progress means all sincerely religious people need to accept social changes that functionally amount to a repudiation of the kind of religious tolerance that evolved after the horrors of the 30 Years War. And in practice this will be experienced as something like a soft ethnic cleansing". It is literally meaningless to say you can just be LDS as a matter of silent belief in your head that doesn't get expressed in the world through community behavior. That's the kind of religious tolerance the Bolsheviks and current China support.
And the actual experience of integrating all those Catholic immigrants into American society over the course of the 20th century absolutely did get experienced, in many ways, like a kind of soft ethnic cleansing, or it certainly was by the parent or grandparent generations watching their home cultures and home religions get completely melted away by mass culture, Hollywood, public schools, and later universities. There was a huge amount of legitimate trauma. There's definitely an undercurrent of all of that in my reading about the 60s, the 70s, forced busing, and the white ethnic turn towards the Reagan coalition later. J. Anthony Lukas's "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families" is a great book about a lot of these tensions. Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land" likewise captures some of that sense in rural Tea Party southerners now.
I know I'm kind of focusing more on religion than "ethnicity" here, but to be honest, even going along with a "racism" frame about immigration is already a way of asserting something about why these issues matter that seems, as far as I can tell, audaciously out of step with the actual on-the-ground experiences of why immigration actually ends up so fraught in practice.
Noah Smith recently wrote a tweet that was something about how he had lived in cosmopolitan neighborhoods with lots of diverse immigrants all his life, those neighborhoods were always great and benefited from that, and therefore anyone who had a problem with such neighborhoods was just wrong or ignorant or something.
Franklin Foer a year ago wrote an Atlantic piece (archive version of the original version here: https://archive.is/rzozj) that is really quite interesting titled "The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending", and it covers a lot of interesting ideas, but it does it really good job of fleshing out a much more detailed version of the argument that my PhD friend made, too.
I'm legitimately sorry this post is so Jewish example heavy - those just happen to be the most well-articulated examples I have at hand, and the Foer piece in particular is quite interesting in all sorts of ways - but I do want to emphasize that a lot of the university connected non-Jewish progressives I'm currently around would likely agree with much of these arguments, so I really do think it's a progressive thing.
I know I'm not quite responding to the parent post (especially about the role of changing technology in making assimilation harder), but I think it's actually really important to be much more clear-eyed about the reality of the previous cycle of mass immigration and assimilation. Some of the facts on the ground have changed (broadcast media and Hollywood matter less, social media complicates things, there was a way that intellectual confidence and energy in internationalism was ascendant in that previous era in a way that it clearly isn't now), but it's also definitely the case that much of the retconning about the previous experience of immigration is very... selective... about who has written those stories, and which experiences get captured and recounted.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
4m ago
Yeah I considered adding that in as the closest example that doesn't quite fit.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
4m ago
Then we should go back to calling each other hideous hermaphroditical characters
cjet79
7m ago
I'd say that food is a massive and very important aspect of culture. Its behind language in importance. But maybe as important as religion. Definitely more important than holidays (since many holidays are heavily defined by religion and food).
You eat food every day. You share meals with family and the people you like most in the world. Food can lock in memories, and eating it again can bring back those memories. Its one area where attempts to relentlessly optimize everything enjoyable and unique out of life have mostly failed (meal replacement options were only ever popular in small enclaves of weird programmers and rationalist). Food is one the first ways people like to meet their romantic partners. Food is how we celebrate.
Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?
faceh
16m ago
Yeah.
Assimilation is harder just by bein
I don’t think this is some kind of groundbreaking point but why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument?
A) As you say, they're not as smart as they portray themselves (95% confidence) and these arguments genuinely don't occur to them and they're not going to consider them deeply even if they did.
B) They are indeed propagandists (which goes to the above point, you don't need to be smart to be one, if you can repeat the desired arguments 'convincingly.'), but they're independent propagandists and they're mostly in it for money and a crumb of status.
C) Sloppy arguments work when you are never, ever, ever forced to engage with the other side, or a smart interloper, or even acknowledge the holes in your argument unless someone with a higher status in your tribe points it out... at which point they generally snap into line and adjust their talking points as needed.
THAT right there is my primary objection to "public intellectuals" like Yglesias, Hanania, Noah Smith, they literally never seek out the strongest argument on the other side and attempt to debunk it by engaging with the strongest intellectuals who oppose them.
I watched Alex Nowrasteh get absolutely creamed because he wants to uphold the "Right wing violence is rewarded/celebrated by the right and generally denounced by the left" narrative, THE SAME DAY that the left is venerating the death of a violent lefty.
These are not serious people. They have to engulf their ideas in bubble wrap and display them behind six layers of plexiglass in order to keep them from being shattered by the slightest breeze.
I can’t help but think repeating a catechism has value to building political unity even (perhaps especially if) it’s fake.
Undoubtedly. That's the part they've monetized. Since a huge number of the audience you're courting is within one standard deviation of the median IQ, you just have to impress those guys to and keep them paying you to have an impact and make a decent living.
So a ~120 can probably impress the 100-110s enough to get them to accept him as 'one of them' and pay a bit of money to hear their preferred opinions blurted back to them with a bit of extra polish and a layer of respectability.
After that point, its just a matter of guarding your market share.
hydroacetylene
22m ago
I mean, I’ve met third gen Hispanics in America. ‘Basically Mexican’ they are not. Assimilation totally happens if the immigrants are willing.
I don’t know if Somalis are willing or not.
Quantumfreakonomics
24m ago
Here is the Yglesias tweet. Note that this is very specifically a response to a screenshotted Matt Walsh tweet.
The Walsh argument (if you can call it that) is thus:
-
There exists at least one place in the United States (Dearborn) which has a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms.
-
It would be bad if the entire country was majority Muslim and had Islamic cultural norms.
-
Therefore Dearborn Michigan having a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms is bad. (This isn’t explicitly stated, but I think it is strongly implied.)
Matt Yglesias responds to this by pointing out a counterexample; Little Italy 100 years ago had a majority Italian population and Italian cultural norms, and yet this didn’t result in the Italianification of American society.
This is not intended to be a fully general argument in favor of immigration. It is a response to a specific bad argument. If you are already anti-immigration, you probably read Walsh’s argument and fill in the gaps with your own pre-existing cognitive scaffold, but none of that is actually there in the text that Yglesias is responding to.
SecureSignals
28m ago
TikTok as a Weapon of War
When the TikTok forced divesture was passed over a year ago, after failing to gain sufficient support in earlier efforts, it was immediately clear to me that alarmism over Chinese ownership of the algorithm was only a pretext obscuring the political forces that actually dictated the sale: the Jewish lobby induced Congress to act in order to transfer TikTok to a new owner who would censor and manipulate the content algorithm of TikTok to be in favor of Israel and the Jewish people. This certainly wasn't a leap, there were secret recordings of Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL saying that something has to be done about TikTok. And then hundreds of Jewish groups lobby for the forced divesture, and then it happens in a highly divided Congress, with some lawmakers explicitly citing this pressure as being decisive in securing support for this legislation that had previously failed.
Still, @2rafa disputed that characterization of the forced TikTok divesture. But now that the dust is settling we can review what has happened:
TikTok and its algorithm is now essentially under the control of Zionist Jew Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, who has been described as the largest private donor to the IDF (FWIW I could not find any evidence Ellison has given private donations to the US military). Ellison's son, David Ellison, acquired CBS news last month which is reportedly going to hire Bari Weiss to manage the editorial direction of the organization:
As part of the deal, I am told David plans to give Bari a role at CBS News that would, among other things, task his fellow Millennial with guiding the editorial direction of the division. Bari’s avowedly pro-Israel and anti-woke worldview—not to mention her broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition—would inevitably inspire blowback from various corners of the newsroom, and could dramatically change the editorial posture and reputation of one of the most storied, and certainly self-important, institutions in American journalism. For David, that’s likely part of the point.
TikTok's algorithm, which is now under the control of Ellison, will be audited and retrained. But the significant reforms to content moderation on TikTok are already well underway, in July a Jewish Zionist and former IDF solider Erica Mindel was hired for the position of "Public Policy Manager, Hate Speech":
The position involves developing and driving the company’s positions on hate speech, according to the job description...
It also involves “spearheading long-term policy strategies” regarding hate speech, monitoring online content, and advocating for the company’s policy stances. It specifically states that the position involves “serving as a subject matter expert on antisemitism and hate speech in internal and external meetings” and “analyzing hate speech trends, focusing on antisemitic content.”
Netanyahu on the TikTok acquisition
Most remarkably, in a focus group session with American social media influencers last Friday in New York, Benjamin Netanyahu himself simply admitted that the acquisition of TikTok was the most important development in enabling Israel to wield social media as a weapon of war:
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu briefed American influencers on TikTok, calling it the “most important” weapon in securing support for Israel on the right-wing.
He went on to say, “Weapons change over time... the most important ones are the social media,” and, “the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok... I hope it goes through because it can be consequential."
Near the end of the clip Netanyahu says "if we can get those two things [TikTok and X] we can get a lot... we have to fight the fight. To take, give direction, to the Jewish people, and give direction to our non-Jewish friends or those who could be our Jewish friends.
What's astonishing is that they are now simply admitting what they are doing openly. They aren't even hiding it. When Netanyahu discusses social media as a weapon of war, the war he is not referring to is not against Hamas, it is against us and our access to free public discourse, the information we receive in news media and content algorithms, and the propaganda we're exposed to on a daily basis.
Last year in 2024 a major scandal in alternative media erupted with the investigation into two Russian media executives from Tenet Media, in a $10 million scheme to illegally fund Tenet Media and influence it to promote Russian propaganda. And certainly this is a major problem. But this Russian propaganda campaign does not even remotely reach the levels of deeply-embedded foreign influence in American news and social media in comparison to Zionist influence.
Larry Ellison is a foreign agent. David Ellison is a foreign agent. Jared Kushner is a foreign agent. This enormous level of foreign influence in our information stream is a huge problem, and it's not limited to Netanyahu and Israel. It's endemic to the entire international Jewish community across the entire world. The level of support among the Jewish community for this foreign influence deeply embedded in our society is extremely high and the opposition is basically non-existent. The extremely small number of what 2rafa calls "self-hating Jews" who acknowledge what is happening and oppose it are outliers. The rest either actively support it or deny the problem, citing "anti-semitic conspiracy theories" about Jews controlling the media and wielding it as a weapon of war against the minds of the gentiles. And yet Netanyahu, a foreign leader, travels to New York and simply admits what they are doing. Russian or Chinese nationalists engaging in this behavior would be wildly intolerable, but Jewish nationalists are systematically engaging in this behavior with total impunity.
Netanyahu's meeting with the social media influencers seems to foreshadow more pressure on X, now that the TikTok problem is being solved according to Netanyahu.
5434a
28m ago
It's been a while since I re-read it but I think it was in Robert Pirsig's Lila (good book, not too long. I think you'd like it) that floated an idea along the lines that when progress becomes unstable the pursuit of progress will in faltering fall back to the last stable/secure state.
Do you foresee your fictional world of Minecraft Tidus slipping back to and re-stabilising at the level (if not the same location) of the last stable state upon its slopes, or as you seem to hint see it tipping over into ruinous decline back into the ocean?
plural
29m ago
For much of horror it is an amplification and expansion of a mystery. Instead of who killed whom and why, it becomes how is this possible and how do we stop it? And often the answers will not be available but that's part of the appeal of horror that it can't answer everything or more often that it won't. You get what the story provides, horror makes it easy to be sloppy, yeah, but it also makes sure it's a genre that can allow anything to happen.
Now, what you're describing is the tone of horror. The telltale signs that show or trick the audience into believing that anything can happen. In other genres it's very rare for things not to work out, for evil to triumph, for the protagonist to lose and die, but it's accepted as part of the genre of horror. If characters can die horribly than it's more possible that important characters can die. If important characters can die then evil can win. If evil can win then you're watching something that you can't predict.
But this goes beyond plot contrivances. Unless a story goes out of its way to tone-match to another genre then horror is the catch-all bottom of the pit for anything weird. If it's time travel and it doesn't go out of its way to try to be a comedy or make damn sure known that it's scientific then it ends up in horror. Horror is the genre without a safety-net to make sure that it stays within certain boundaries. Sure, it makes it easy to have things end up worse because genre boundaries usually exist for a reason to make things more enjoyable but for a lot of people the risk is worth the reward because they crave things that are different, odd, unexplained or even gross.
Aside from the rest, the gross, the gore, is a taste that not everyone has but it's a human appetite that's really not served elsewhere but there are people that watch pimples being popped, or surgeries, or even actual people dying. There's an aspect of just straight up visceral response to the thing be it disgust or awe but just a shock out of the humdrum of thinking that someone being murdered doesn't matter or is nothing. A movie about a serial killer that strangles victims doesn't destroy is disrespect the body enough to make people care or be invested, the deeper we go the more we force the audience to get invested in what's happening. For most of Saw the people in the traps are people that are bad and a lot deserve to die but the horror at the disfigurement, destruction of their bodies, the struggle against death, we suddenly care whether they live or die when we probably wouldn't before if it was a just .22 to the back of the head or a rope around their necks. I don't like the saw movies, really, but I have to admit the entirety of the gore and grossness makes the deaths inside it feel closer to real than they would have otherwise and each successive one makes you want the next character to survive the trap(s). It's more expensive than swelling violins but it's probably more effective as well.
But I'll go back to what I said before, you're describing the tone of horror movies which is basically a costume these days and it's specifically trying to make you believe that anything can happen to heighten excitement. There are quite a lot of horror movies that aren't horror but just wear it as a costume these days and there are quite a lot of movies that are called horror just because they have more gore than is acceptable or set a large expectation that good guys can lose. Maybe tone is what horror actually is but I don't think that Silence of the Lambs or Green Room are horror just because they have some or a lot of that tone.
It sounds like you just don't enjoy horror and that's fine. Horror is the bottom of the pit avoiding every other genre's safety nets for good or ill.
sohois
36m ago
Saudi Arabia takes its biggest step yet into the biggest of culture war arenas:
EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for $55 Billion
Electronic Arts has been bought up by the Saudi investment arm PIF, alongside Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners and PE giant Silver Lake. The trio paid $55Bn for EA, albeit in a leveraged buyout involving $20Bn of debt financing(!).
On the surface, nothing too interesting, perhaps another example of the incredible growth in private equity. And that might be all there is, just 3 funds thinking there is untapped potential in what was an often poorly run gaming giant. However, PIF is almost certainly the largest owner, and AP News identifies the deal as part of the Saudi strategy. I expect Kushner is either wetting his beak or acting as a lightning rod for the Saudis, while Silver Lake probably needed no encouragement to get in on the deal.
The Saudis appear to have identified major cultural industries in Sports and Gaming as prime opportunities for...something? "Sportswashing" makes sense for the tiny nations and city states like Qatar and Abu Dhabi which have no real power outside of their resources, but it's not clear what Saudi Arabia gains from pumping hundreds of billions into these industries. Much has been said of the desire of MBS to diversify Saudi Arabia, and at least with this deal there is room to move EA functions into the country, but it's a drop in the bucket. The leveraged nature of the deal is also unusual; that's the kind of option you typically pursue when asset stripping - neither the Saudis nor Silver Lake needs that kind of business.
Browser
41m ago
Also these days the world's enough of a monoculture so random food trends and innovations in far-flung lands can be copied without much actual meaningful travel.
My city has a very small Japanese population and nonetheless there's a plethora of popular Japanese restaurants around.
faceh
42m ago
AIs of all kinds really do seem to have a knack for creating nightmare-fuel content that is just barely, barely comprehensible but deeply unnerving for hard-to-articulate reasons. Like just under the surface, there's a psyche made of pure chaos. Really gets at the "Shoggoth with a smiley face mask" nature.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
46m ago
I am not sneeding about no skill, I am sneeding about no expression - or at the very least, significantly less expression. How many prompters are going to painstakingly describe every detail they just don't have the painting skill to put on canvas, and how many are going to go "hot woman in cyberpunk armor, in the style of studio ghibli" or whatever? At least the photographer actually has to discover/set up the shot.
benmmurphy
46m ago
Harder to be obese when our food is so terrible
striker
47m ago
Re I Am Charlotte Simmons, at least part of the criticism seems to have come from Wolfe’s position as an untouchable. He became a demigod, and demigods often become targets of underlings who think they can raise their own status by taking someone else down a peg or two.
Pulpachair
50m ago
It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.
Oh! Now I understand why no one likes the English.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
51m ago
The Americans similarly often seem to think that there's a huge amount of friction in the everyday use of the metric, though. "Lol do women in Europe put "no men under 182.88 cm" in their dating ads?" No, though they might put no men under 180 cm.
striker
51m ago
I remember that too, and being affronted, because I enjoyed it so much. In a way that might have been when my trust in “the critics” started to erode.
There was a great review show on BBC for years called variously The Late Show, Late Review, Newsnight Review and it was always fun to hear three critics disagree so vehemently and often ridicule each other’s arguments. In contrast newspaper critics got to hold forth without being questioned. Unfortunately Late Review was a victim of the BBC’s cost-cutting and political correctness.
striker
55m ago
Thanks! Had heard about The Mandibles but never read it. [This comment from Shriver is exactly the kind of thing I’m seeking: “Having, like the rest of us, gone through the whole 2008 financial debacle I thought I had plenty of material (for a novel set in a dystopian economic near-future). My reading on what happened in 2008 is that we dodged a bullet. I feel as if that bullet is still whizzing around the planet.”]
Feel like I should be taking a fresh look at her whole body of work. (We Need To Talk About Kevin was told from pov of mother of a school shooter. For some reason I never picked it up.)
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
1hr ago
Why does it always come back to food?
No, I don't believe that this is just an idiosyncrasy of Yglesias, or just a fun example that he picked for no real reason. This is a recurring pattern. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard throughout my life "we live in a world with a large diversity of cultures, for example, different people eat different types of food...". Food is the first thing you think of when you think of "culture"? Really? The "we need immigrants for their food" argument is not unique to Yglesias, this is a known talking point.
Just last night I was having a conversation with a woman who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food. It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.
(I mean, frankly I should already know why it always comes back to food: Nietzsche suggested in GoM that a people's philosophical outlook is an epiphenomenon of their dietary choices. Perhaps this is the grug-genius alliance in action, and I am the seething midwit who insists on being unnecessarily contrarian. I dunno man... it just strikes me as an obliviousness of the fact that people even have a psychological or spiritual existence that extends beyond their material means of sustenance.)
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1hr ago
but I've never seen a South Asian ghetto in America
Patterson, New Jersey. Maybe not a "ghetto" but no 5 star resort either.
It is likely harder to assimilate in the modern world where immigrant populations are not cut off as opposed to the old world. So pointing to historic examples of assimilation do not hold for today because the factors have changed.
This is exactly right. During the early 1900s the fertility rate of the population in USA was around 3.5 children per woman. At the same time there were around 13.5 million immigrants living in the USA out of the population of 92 million, so approximately 14%. The birth rate was over 30 per 1,000 population or around 2,7 million a year. So the total population of immigrants in USA after spurt in late 1800s and early 1900s was equivalent of 5 years of births. And even then it stretched the resources eventually leading to Immigration Act of 1924 limiting the immigration, the 1910 was actually the peak year of immigration share which fell down to 5% in 1970. In 2025 the total population of immigrants is around 50 million - or around 16% out of 340 million - with 3,6 million births in 2024. So we are talking about 14 years of natural births in the nation.
Additionally early 20th century was magical for USA as it was the era of birth of mass media especially radio and television at the tail end of successfully finishing the Manifest Destiny project. Also US won two world wars and the nation swam in prestige and patriotic fervor, which massively helped with US ethnogenesis as we see it now. I'd say that capacity of the nation to accept immigration is regulated by proportion of immigrants compared to natural replacement of domestic people paired with the ability to project cultural dominance and assimilate these foreign immigrants. The interesting thing about progressive policies is that they are actively working against both, but definitely against the assimilation with their multi-culti salad bowl ideology.
You know, there are two stories about EA, and I don't know which one is true, or if it's a synthesis of both.
One is EA the strip mining vulture capitalist. Rolling up to independent studios with deals too good to refuse, and then putting them on permanent crunch status churning out mediocre sequels until the studio gets shut down.
The other is EA the naive savior of struggling independent studios. Studios that find themselves in over their heads, with cost running away from them, literally about to run out of money with their next opus still 6 months to year from release. So EA comes in, thinking if they give Lord British, Peter Molyneux or Chris Roberts a years worth of financing in exchange for ownership and some oversight, the ship could be righted.
In the 90's, I was 1000% on team Origin, Bullfrog, Westwood, etc.
After each of these luminaries ran their respective Kickstarter scams and mismanaged the projects to degrees that are legendary, I'm more sympathetic to EA.
Anyways, the point I'm eventually getting to, is I will laugh my ass off if EA turns out to be every bit the lemon to the Saudi's private equity firms as buying up Origin and Bullfrog were to EA in the 90's. Personally I can't remember the last time I bought an EA game, and it's hard to imagine anything about this acquisition making them worse. There might even be some upside! It's hard to imagine the Saudi's letting another game be as gay as Veilguard was.
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