corollary to “japanese people draw other japanese people with big eyes because they envy the white race”
I have it on good authority that the Japanese are, in fact, the only white people on Earth.
The year is 2068. The forces of global Neoreaction have been defeated by the armies of the Islamo-Progressive Earth Congress. The final survivors retreat to Japan, the last bastion of the white ethnic identity on Earth…
You should do AUSJ. It's the sort of thing you'd be good at.
This is right up there with “Scott Alexander keeps recommending me as a good right-wing writer“ in terms of confusion as to what in my post history could possibly have prompted such a reaction.
Giving the Cosmopolitan Liberal Globalists a number of cities to practice their immigration policies in isn’t such a terrible idea. Cosmopolitan Liberal Globalists love cities.
I cannot trust it will actually turn out like that at all due to how this has gone previously.
Why I specified “agreement to execute anyone who commits an honor killing” is that it’s an ideological sin to do that, and thus serves as a costly signal that they actually care and aren’t just trying to pull one over like they have previously, when they promised this stuff would not happen.
(Also it would de-normalize honor killings, but you get the idea.)
anaisnein
It brings in the whole existing orthogonal discourse over the death penalty and complicates the already complicated debate terrain. Also, summary execution is more of a What’s Wrong With Those Others thing and less a What’s Right About Us Here thing and I would think you wouldn’t be enthusiastic about that, it instantiates the cultural decay you’re postulating.
Well, let’s assume that the plan is to create an international-thinking city-state that values this free migration.
Right off the bat, the existing high-immigration city-state that does not have an issue with honor killings is Singapore, where the sentence for murder is death by hanging. Until 2012, this was mandatory. So flat out, if you engage in an “honor killing” in Singapore, they will kill you.
But of course, we don’t have to just copy-paste Singapore.
Cultural practices have inertia. Apply that inertia to Italian cuisine and you get Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Apply that inertia to throwing acid on women to control them, and you get acid attacks by British gangs.
They have to be stopped before that inertia can take hold.
And since we’re being so heavily about freedom of movement, we want to put the brakes on this within one generation, since we can’t necessarily rely on other methods, like limiting the maximum size of one incoming ethnic group and where they live in order to fragment them such that their number of cultural graph edges is insufficient to sustain their culture.
That leaves responding to barbarism and medieval behaviors, to some degree, with medieval means.
To some degree you can rely on liberal atomization, but only if the conditions are right for that atomization to have an effect, which means no cousin marriages or other barriers that honor-killers and the like can use to stop their families from atomizing. (And note that banning all new cousin marriages is, itself, not without controversy.) It also takes a while.
The sharper the change, the greater the degree of braking force necessary. It must be communicated not just to the men involved, but to the entire community they are a part of that this activity is not just socially disapproved of by the ethnic majority (who they may not care about), but that it is bullshit for chumps that only an idiot would engage in.
Getting executed because your took up arms against the state might be martyrdom, but getting executed because you honor-killed your sister is just stupid (and therefore low-status).
Otherwise you risk a long-burning change that could ride under the surface until it obtains enough political support (which may not be legalization, but just deliberately ignoring the problem).
If 5% of your population cousin marry, it takes a congressman to end it. If 10% of your population cousin marry, it takes a President. If 30% of your population cousin marry, it takes a King. The right time to end it, then, is before it cracks 6%.
It’s interesting to me that modern progressives make so much hay about the tendency for election systems to deliberately overrepresent rural and low-population areas, since that’s one of relatively few cases where protections for a traditionally marginalized group actually are enshrined in law. Obviously this comes in part from a tendency not to think of “marginalized groups” along those lines in the first place, but I wonder how much of that comes from the fact that people are used to them having disproportionate power and influence because it was given to them intentionally as a counterbalance. “Urbanites fuck the provincials” is one of the most timeless axes of exploitation, and rural and other low-population areas are kinda fucked even with this system, so they’d be ridiculously fucked without it.
Of course this is a flashpoint because the regions in question are arch-conservative reactionary hotbeds and cosmopolitan urban liberals resent being held hostage to their demands, and objectively many of those demands are very damaging for huge swaths of society that voted against them. But, like, that’s not that unusual an outcome when you give otherwise-disenfranchised groups an outsized influence to compensate.The liberal coalition of the disenfranchised is only a liberal coalition because the ones who would prefer something else have nowhere to get it.
You should do AUSJ. It's the sort of thing you'd be good at.
This is right up there with “Scott Alexander keeps recommending me as a good right-wing writer“ in terms of confusion as to what in my post history could possibly have prompted such a reaction.
I don’t have enough firm conviction to say that a national divorce is the only answer to the future of America but it’s seriously looking like that’s the case
A number of people have responded “well if there are open borders, can’t you just move?”
However, if your culture has low crime and lots of money, then those are very desirable qualities and people will follow you, even if their cultural practices generate more crime and less economic value. Eventually you will have to make yourself so toxic or live somewhere so otherwise naturally terrible that it isn’t worth the price to follow you, otherwise there will be nowhere left to run to.
There are ways you can manage this and still have higher immigration, but not if you flat-out refuse to acknowledge the trade-off even exists. Singapore could be considered an example here.
You’re envisioning a swift transition to a sort of perfect global preference equilibrium. I don’t think that’s remotely likely.
Assume all borders became open tomorrow. (I don’t think there’s a scenario short of the total dissolution of all nation-states into a single world government in which “open borders” could ever mean literally zero customs and immigration apparatus, just walk in, so to keep “open borders” a remotely plausible and coherent concept even just at a policy thought experiment level, I’m defining it as the scenario in which it is feasible for anyone to move anywhere. That is, residency with a path to citizenship in any country is available to the average person who’s willing to jump through manageable hoops, e.g., long waiting periods for full citizenship/social benefit eligibility, basic language skills testing for same, adequate security screening. This is vastly different from current-world reality, and I’m very comfortable calling it an open borders scenario.)
Huge numbers of people will not instantly decide to just up and move to another country simply because they like the idea.
Moving to a different country is undertaking a massive, pervasive, whole-life transition. It is not a thing you just up and do in the spirit of comparison shopping like buying a Honda when you’ve always had Fords.
Emigration is a huge, frightening, difficult, ~alienating~ undertaking for many, many more reasons than just the thorny logistics of obtaining legal residency status.
Even the most ~rootless~ technocratic globalist universalist types generally have families, local ties, careers premised on the industrial and credentialing infrastructure of the country they already live in, comfort zones, etc, and most won’t just up and leave everything they know and move far away to a strange place without a lot of weighing and considering. And if you’re concerned about immigrants showing up here with values inimical to Western culture or whatever (cf the big chunk of thread already cut off, readers with a strong stomach should see the notes), those aren’t really the people you’re worried about. You’re worried about people who have very strong rootedness in their own tribal and community norms, where those norms differ from ours. Those sorts of people won’t all just instantly up and flock here in droves for reasons much less compelling than “my home city has just been bombed to smithereens” or “my government is currently rounding up people of my [race, sexuality, religion, etc] and shooting them.” A fat pay rise might be enough to swing the open and curious globalists; it’s not going to be a good enough reason for the superrooted.
I of course speak as someone who is interested in proactive/elective emigration. But I didn’t acquire that interest in a glib or facile way, or merely on the basis of superficial preferences in climate or architecture, as much as I like talking about those sorts of things. I have experience living abroad as an adult, and found it challenging, despite my natively low susceptibility to loneliness. I also have already immigrated once, with my family to the U.S. as a small child, and even though we had every advantage as immigrants — my father is a neurologist and ours was a thoroughly considered, planned, self-funded, legal and aboveboard move from another anglophone country to an America in a welcoming post-bicentennial “melting pot” mood — the psychological toll on all of us
was meaningful, deep, and lasting. I don’t trivialize what emigration involves. I don’t think that most people do. (It was worst for me as an introverted child and my mother as an extroverted adult; my brother as an extrovert starting kindergarten assimilated far more easily into U.S. school culture, and my father as an introvert took less damage from social uprooting and precipitous loss of regular interaction with cotribalists. As an adult, I figure I’m relatively temperamentally advantaged for weathering the stresses, and I have good language skills, but I expect to go through some very tough times during the first few years if I do manage to move. This shit is hard. It’s not a Consumer Reports clipboard shopping kind of decision.)
Look, the existing policies which are described as racist and discriminatory and evil and bigoted were not enough to prevent acid attacks from taking off in London.
So I would say no, those people actually do move to Western countries, and they actually do bring practices such as FGM with them. You would think that they’d rather stay rooted in places where acid attacks are normal, but that is demonstrably not the case.
Would fewer of them move if the welfare system were much less gentle to immigrants for multiple years? Possibly. I gave Singapore as an example of how higher levels might be tolerated for a reason. But do the people with “refugees welcome” banners think that way? As far as I can tell, no.
And, as far as I can tell, they’re against longer waiting periods and screening, against having an official language that everyone has to learn, say “there is no such thing as British food”, don’t draw a distinction between the risks of Sihks immigrating and the risks of Sunnis immigrating, and so on.
So I’m not inclined to shift in support of greater levels of immigration from any argument that doesn’t say “and also, we will cane anyone who commits an acid attack, and we will execute anyone who commits an honor killing.” But that isn’t very liberal.
I view welfare spending not so much as a matter of rights, but as something you get away with.
If you have enough money, and you’re clever enough about it, you can get away with spending money on people who are not net economically productive members of society. This is good if you can manage it, since people don’t really deserve to suffer for not being very economically productive, but you have to keep in mind the underlying economic reality - only what is produced can be consumed.
And if you’re smart about it, then you can set the situation up so you have more production relative to the people that need welfare over the long term, and you can then either increase the welfare (or send it to more people) or reduce its (per capita) effective burden.
Also, I’m pretty sure that some of that American secret for integration is just that America is really big, costs more money to get to, and that it erodes cultures through Capitalism. Low density of an incoming population makes staying separated more difficult.
I know some of you are going to read this and think I’m a big evil person, but whatever.
You know, I didn’t care about the immigration issue so much ten years ago.
Having immigrants from India, from China… that was NORMAL. That was what I grew up with.
But then suddenly
Acid attacks are “a normal British tradition”
Bombings are “part and parcel of living in a big city”
Child sex trafficking at elevated rates is evil bigotry to bring up
Cousin marriage rates massively increasing the risk of birth defects because they have gone on for multiple generations is now a problem, even though the native groups rarely engage in it
Van attacks and truck attacks where people walking on the street are run over becoming a thing
“Honor killings” became a thing here
Now, a lot of people are going to object “but you’re in America, this hasn’t happened (much) in America!” YET. There is nothing different enough about America to prevent this if America adopts the same policies, except that we have guns, and so if someone tries to sex traffic our children people might find them and shoot them.
We already had an underground FGM ring busted in Michigan. They told me that wouldn’t happen.
My standards are not especially high, here.
Now I know some of you want really absurdly high levels of immigration.
But if you want that, then you have to accept a very different and significantly less liberal framework for criminal justice and citizenship rights.It is possible to resolve these issues, but you must be willing to pay the ideological price.
A number of people have responded “well if there are open borders, can’t you just move?”
However, if your culture has low crime and lots of money, then those are very desirable qualities and people will follow you, even if their cultural practices generate more crime and less economic value. Eventually you will have to make yourself so toxic or live somewhere so otherwise naturally terrible that it isn’t worth the price to follow you, otherwise there will be nowhere left to run to.
There are ways you can manage this and still have higher immigration, but not if you flat-out refuse to acknowledge the trade-off even exists. Singapore could be considered an example here.
And they say the EU is good for nothing! Multinational corporations sell different versions of their products in different countries, but enough is enough!
Fico threatened to boycott brands over different (lesser quality) of products in V4 countries: German biscuits made for sale in Poland have less butter. Italian Nutella is more chocolatey in Austria than in Hungary.
I kind of get why companies do this, and why people feel cheated (remember the outcry over con syrup vs cane sugar Coca Cola), but mandating companies sell the exact identical version of food products sounds over the top.
I don’t know how you would label this properly. It kind of undermines the brand of Nutella if it means different things in different places. Nutella(5)? New Nutella?
yeah just give ‘em a different name, surely
Nutella Nutella (1) Nutella (2) Copy of Nutella (2) Nutella 2008 Copy of New Nutella (3)
periodic reminder that the word “emoji” is a borrowing of a native japanese word, not a reborrowing of an english word! “emoji” comes from 絵文字、a compound of「絵」(え e, “image, picture”) and 文字 (モジ moji, “word”), and is completely unrelated to the English word “emoticon.”
you could say that’s a folk etymoloji
Emoji would not have caught on in the west as a word if it hadn’t had that similarity though
Emojicon
If you are reading this message, you have been exiled to Tasmania.
Duration: Until the end of Tumblr, or six years, whichever comes first. Reason for Exile: “Emojicon” Appeals: Standard appeal only.
You have a right to documentation. You may have other rights which are not listed in this document…
like I’m supposed to respect genuine human connection from someone who couldn’t face me in a fair fight
This is why all men date only wrestlers and MMA fighters, a practice I approve of in my quest to create the ultimate Brazilian Jiu Jitsu martial artist.
Everyone’s all “actually, stereotype accuracy!” but half the black people in my college went to the anime club meetings at least once, so.
And, like, back before I went to college I was the token white guy and also the one guy who wasn’t really into DBZ and Naruto and so on.
Puts an interesting spin on SWPL politics – maybe it’s less “white people shouldn’t be allowed to have spaces” and more “I feel guilty about being a SWPL but everything that’s popular among non-SWPLs is ~uncool~, so what we need to do is take the people who are visibly not SWPLs and somehow get them to like SWPL stuff”.
There are way way way too many Asian people who like anime for it to be a SWPL thing.
Unfortunately, the practice has a longer history in the area of Pakistan, so even if we accept your argument that it was entirely classist (which I don’t, given that I’ve read some people who tried to report it got sent for sensitivity training), being more selective about immigration still comes out ahead on the matter.
So if your police force is too “lol class” to handle the situation, and it won’t be realistically fixed soon, then you need to plan for that when setting your other policies.
And why wouldn’t the lower classes face the brunt of the cost of blind multiculturalism? If they were the high-charisma types that are in danger from going to concerts, it would be harder to sweep under the rug.
And as you might imagine, I don’t want this sort of thing to come to America, which means putting a stop to it before, rather than after, it starts. Because the same “it will never happen” arguments are made by the same ideological groups.
So we should just allow the class stuff to slide? So that then, by golly, at least these children will be abused by grown men of their own skin tone?
And AGAIN, you seem, despite your interest in cultural preservation, willfully determined to ignore the vast cultural differences between the United States and Britain. I’ve lived in both countries and the cultural differences, especially once you leave London, are stark.
Let alone the bizarre idea that poor people are suffering from a lack of charisma.
> Specific foreign group commits specific crime at higher rate than general population, reflecting similar crimes in country of origin > Getting police force to overcome classism a perennial problem which is difficult to fix, unlikely to be fixed soon > Exactly what one would expect to happen ensues
So here I am suggesting a course of action that results in less of those crimes, and your accusation is that I don’t care about the number of those crimes.
And as for the charisma, obviously if they can’t make their case well enough on the news media to get the politicians to fix their problem (or rather, get the news media to even cover their case at all), then in that sense, they lack charisma. That isn’t really their fault. News media is like that. But it has to be taken into consideration.
Do tigers have charisma? Maybe not as we humans understand it. But they’re called “charismatic megafauna” because animals like tigers are the ones that draw in the donations and political capital to engage in conservation projects that include animals people don’t care as much about.
So you’re reading “poor people aren’t suave enough” when actually it’s more like “people don’t like poor people enough”.
So people are willing to talk about the Ariana Grande concert bombing. And that bridge vehicle ramming in London. But increases in other crimes will occur mostly where they aren’t priced out… which means among the poor, who will take the brunt of badly-handled multiculturalism. And thus the poor suffering the most from it isn’t any sort of disproof that culture had something to do with it.
Unfortunately, the practice has a longer history in the area of Pakistan, so even if we accept your argument that it was entirely classist (which I don’t, given that I’ve read some people who tried to report it got sent for sensitivity training), being more selective about immigration still comes out ahead on the matter.
So if your police force is too “lol class” to handle the situation, and it won’t be realistically fixed soon, then you need to plan for that when setting your other policies.
And why wouldn’t the lower classes face the brunt of the cost of blind multiculturalism? If they were the high-charisma types that are in danger from going to concerts, it would be harder to sweep under the rug.
And as you might imagine, I don’t want this sort of thing to come to America, which means putting a stop to it before, rather than after, it starts. Because the same “it will never happen” arguments are made by the same ideological groups.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.
If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.
Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.
The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.
You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
“Let’s imagine an idyllic socialist utopia with a population of 100,000. In Utopia, everyone eats healthy organic food, respects the environment and one another, lives in harmony with people of other races, and is completely non-violent. One day, the Prime Minister decides to open up immigration to Americans and discourage them from assimilating.
50,000 Americans come in and move into a part of Utopia that quickly becomes known as Americatown. They bring their guns, their McDonalds, their megachurches, and their racism.
Soon, some Utopians find their family members dying in the crossfire between American street gangs. The megachurches convert a large portion of the Utopians to evangelical Christianity, and it becomes very difficult to get abortions without being harassed and belittled. Black and homosexual Utopians find themselves the target of American hatred, and worse, some young Utopians begin to get affected by American ideas and treat them the same way. American litter fills the previously pristine streets, and Americans find some loopholes in the water quality laws and start dumping industrial waste into the rivers.
By the time society has settled down, we have a society which is maybe partway between Utopia and America. The Americans are probably influenced by Utopian ideas and not quite as bad as their cousins who reminded behind in the States, but the Utopians are no longer as idyllic as their Utopian forefathers, and have inherited some of America’s problems.
Would it be racist for a Utopian to say “Man, I wish we had never let the Americans in?” Would it be hateful to suggest that the borders be closed before even more Americans can enter?
If you are a culturalist, no. Utopian culture is better, at least by Utopian standards, than American culture. Although other cultures can often contribute to enrich your own, there is no law of nature saying that only the good parts of other cultures will transfer over and that no other culture can be worse than yours in any way. The Americans were clearly worse than the Utopians, and it was dumb of the Utopians to let so many Americans in without any safeguards.
Likewise, there are countries that are worse than America. Tribal Afghanistan seems like a pretty good example. Pretty much everything about tribal Afghanistan is horrible. Their culture treats women as property, enforces sharia law, and contains honor killings as a fact of life. They tend to kill apostate Muslims and non-Muslims a lot. Not all members of Afghan tribes endorse these things, but the average Afghan tribesperson is much more likely to endorse them than the average American. If we import a bunch of Afghan tribesmen, their culture is likely to make America a worse place in the same way that American culture makes Utopia a worse place.
But it’s actually much worse than this. We are a democracy. Anyone who moves here and gains citizenship eventually gets the right to vote. People with values different from ours vote for people and laws different from those we would vote for. Progressives have traditionally viewed any opposition to this as anti-immigrant and racist – and, by total coincidence, most other countries, and therefore most immigrants, are progressive.
Imagine a country called Conservia, a sprawling empire of a billion people that has a fifth-dimensional hyperborder with America. The Conservians are all evangelical Christians who hate abortion, hate gays, hate evolution, and believe all government programs should be cut.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Conservians hop the hyperborder fence and enter America, and sympathetic presidents then pass amnesty laws granting them citizenship. As a result, the area you live – or let’s use Berkeley, the area I live – gradually becomes more conservative. First the abortion clinics disappear, as Conservian protesters start harassing them out of business and a government that must increasingly pander to Conservians doesn’t stop them. Then gay people stop coming out of the closet, as Conservian restaurants and businesses refuse to serve them and angry Conservian writers and journalists create an anti-gay climate. Conservians vote 90% Republican in elections, so between them and the area’s native-born conservatives the Republicans easily get a majority and begin defunding public parks, libraries, and schools. Also, Conservians have one pet issue which they promote even more intently than the destruction of secular science – that all Conservians illegally in the United States must be granted voting rights, and that no one should ever block more Conservians from coming to the US.
Is this fair to the native Berkeleyans? It doesn’t seem that way to me. And what if 10 million Conservians move into America? That’s not an outrageous number – there are more Mexican immigrants than that. But it would be enough to have thrown every single Presidential election of the past fifty years to the Republicans – there has never been a Democratic candidate since LBJ who has won the native population by enough of a margin to outweight the votes of ten million Conservians.
But isn’t this incredibly racist and unrealistic? An entire nation of people whose votes skew 90% Republican? No. African-Americans’ votes have historically been around 90% Democratic (93% in the last election). Latinos went over 70% Democratic in the last election. For comparison, white people were about 60% Republicans. If there had been no Mexican immigration to the United States over the past few decades, Romney would probaby have won the last election.
Is it wrong for a liberal citizen of Berkeley in 2013 to want to close the hyperborder with Conservia so that California doesn’t become part of the Bible Belt and Republicans don’t get guaranteed presidencies forever? Would that citizen be racist for even considering this? If not, then pity the poor conservative, who is actually in this exact situation right now.
(a real Reactionary would hasten to add this is more proof that progressives control everything. Because immigration favors progressivism, any opposition to it is racist, but the second we discover the hyperborder with Conservia, the establishment will figure out some reason why allowing immigration is racist. Maybe they can call it “inverse colonialism” or something.)
None of this is an argument against immigration. It’s an argument against immigration by groups with bad Luck and with noticeably different values than the average American. Let any Japanese person who wants move over. Same with the Russians, and the Jews, and the Indians. Heck, it’s not even like it’s saying no Afghans – if they swear on a stack of Korans that they’re going to try to learn English and not do any honor killings, they could qualify as well.
The United States used to have a policy sort of like this. It was called the Immigration Act of 1924. Its actual specifics were dumb, because it banned for example Asians and Jews, but the principle behind it – groups with good outcomes and who are a good match for our values can immigrate as much as they want, everyone else has a slightly harder time – seems broadly wise. So of course progressives attacked it as racist and Worse Than Hitler and it got repealed in favor of the current policy: everyone has a really hard time immigrating but if anyone sneaks over the border under cover of darkness we grant them citizenship anyway because not doing that would be mean.
Once again, coming up with a fair and rational immigration policy wouldn’t require some incredibly interventionist act of state control. It would just require that we notice the hole we’ve been deliberately sticking ourselves in and stop digging.”
I find it sort of weird that this post assumes that diversity-loving people have never lived in the South and in fact find Southerners unspeakably alien and repulsive
like to me this is like “imagine if a town were full of people like your mom’s family and your ex-girlfriend???? THE HORROR”
A.) Russians? RUSSIANS? You’re looking for an example of immigrants who share American values and assimilate easily and you choose RUSSIANS? I….I can’t even.
B.) Black Americans as a whole are…..not quite immigrants. Immigration implies a certain voluntary quality on the part of the demographic. Black Americans are largely the descendants of a population who came here DECIDEDLY against their will. They’ve also been here as long as white Americans, so.
C.) I used to live in a part of the country with a very large, very old Muslim population. They assimilated. Earlier, Chinese Americans assimilated. Before that, the German immigrants who scared Ben Franklin half to death assimilated. America is FANTASTIC at assimilating immigrants, and it’s something Europeans envy about us–I’ve had Scandinavians tell me they WISH their countries were so good at integrating immigrants. Your anxieties may sound plausible enough at certain phases of the moon, but in historical context, they’re hogwash.
You can have a certain rate of immigration depending on the rate of assimilation.
You can only have that immigration without major side effects if you’re willing to pay the ideological price required to accomplish it. These days, the current consensus is not.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Well, part of the issue is that from what I’ve seen people aren’t talking about this in terms of ‘being an ethnic majority is a thing I get benefit out of I want to have that benefit’, where this would involve then looking at how to deal with this, balance various people’s benefits, etc, given various other factors that also exist (other people also get benefit out of being ethnic majorities! The rights of and provisions for ethnic minorities! Other reasons people have to want or need to be in a territory!). They tend to a) take if as given and not even explicitly brought up that they get to get what they want, and b) not really acknowledge the needs and wants of other people involved, tradeoffs, etc. Also c) do stuff like call various ethnic minorities intrinsically evil and all that.
Also in my experience ‘Trump voters’ correlates very highly with ‘people who have not just been unhelpful but in fact often horrible to ethnic minorities in territories they’ve been ethnic majorities in’.
Also as other people pointed out, plenty of people *exist* as ethnic minorities in their territories, this isn’t like a weird mysterious off-screen horror.
Most people are not fully consciously aware of this.
They know, for example, that in other countries, there are polygamy and child marriage. They often don’t think through that the imbalance caused by polygamy really being polygyny in practice is likely what leads to the child marriage (which is also present in polygamy-practicing communities in the developed countries) because of male desperation (not good).
They know they don’t want that sort of thing mucking up their way of life, but like most normie instincts it isn’t totally wrong but it isn’t totally right, either.
If you get a country that really starts thinking all of this through, what you’re looking at is probably not Happy Liberal Land, but the Principality of Singapore.
By the way, speaking of reasons to be in a territory, culture is not independent of the territory’s economic production, nor just an output. It’s also a key input.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.
If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.
Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.
The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.
You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
“Let’s imagine an idyllic socialist utopia with a population of 100,000. In Utopia, everyone eats healthy organic food, respects the environment and one another, lives in harmony with people of other races, and is completely non-violent. One day, the Prime Minister decides to open up immigration to Americans and discourage them from assimilating.
50,000 Americans come in and move into a part of Utopia that quickly becomes known as Americatown. They bring their guns, their McDonalds, their megachurches, and their racism.
Soon, some Utopians find their family members dying in the crossfire between American street gangs. The megachurches convert a large portion of the Utopians to evangelical Christianity, and it becomes very difficult to get abortions without being harassed and belittled. Black and homosexual Utopians find themselves the target of American hatred, and worse, some young Utopians begin to get affected by American ideas and treat them the same way. American litter fills the previously pristine streets, and Americans find some loopholes in the water quality laws and start dumping industrial waste into the rivers.
By the time society has settled down, we have a society which is maybe partway between Utopia and America. The Americans are probably influenced by Utopian ideas and not quite as bad as their cousins who reminded behind in the States, but the Utopians are no longer as idyllic as their Utopian forefathers, and have inherited some of America’s problems.
Would it be racist for a Utopian to say “Man, I wish we had never let the Americans in?” Would it be hateful to suggest that the borders be closed before even more Americans can enter?
If you are a culturalist, no. Utopian culture is better, at least by Utopian standards, than American culture. Although other cultures can often contribute to enrich your own, there is no law of nature saying that only the good parts of other cultures will transfer over and that no other culture can be worse than yours in any way. The Americans were clearly worse than the Utopians, and it was dumb of the Utopians to let so many Americans in without any safeguards.
Likewise, there are countries that are worse than America. Tribal Afghanistan seems like a pretty good example. Pretty much everything about tribal Afghanistan is horrible. Their culture treats women as property, enforces sharia law, and contains honor killings as a fact of life. They tend to kill apostate Muslims and non-Muslims a lot. Not all members of Afghan tribes endorse these things, but the average Afghan tribesperson is much more likely to endorse them than the average American. If we import a bunch of Afghan tribesmen, their culture is likely to make America a worse place in the same way that American culture makes Utopia a worse place.
But it’s actually much worse than this. We are a democracy. Anyone who moves here and gains citizenship eventually gets the right to vote. People with values different from ours vote for people and laws different from those we would vote for. Progressives have traditionally viewed any opposition to this as anti-immigrant and racist – and, by total coincidence, most other countries, and therefore most immigrants, are progressive.
Imagine a country called Conservia, a sprawling empire of a billion people that has a fifth-dimensional hyperborder with America. The Conservians are all evangelical Christians who hate abortion, hate gays, hate evolution, and believe all government programs should be cut.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Conservians hop the hyperborder fence and enter America, and sympathetic presidents then pass amnesty laws granting them citizenship. As a result, the area you live – or let’s use Berkeley, the area I live – gradually becomes more conservative. First the abortion clinics disappear, as Conservian protesters start harassing them out of business and a government that must increasingly pander to Conservians doesn’t stop them. Then gay people stop coming out of the closet, as Conservian restaurants and businesses refuse to serve them and angry Conservian writers and journalists create an anti-gay climate. Conservians vote 90% Republican in elections, so between them and the area’s native-born conservatives the Republicans easily get a majority and begin defunding public parks, libraries, and schools. Also, Conservians have one pet issue which they promote even more intently than the destruction of secular science – that all Conservians illegally in the United States must be granted voting rights, and that no one should ever block more Conservians from coming to the US.
Is this fair to the native Berkeleyans? It doesn’t seem that way to me. And what if 10 million Conservians move into America? That’s not an outrageous number – there are more Mexican immigrants than that. But it would be enough to have thrown every single Presidential election of the past fifty years to the Republicans – there has never been a Democratic candidate since LBJ who has won the native population by enough of a margin to outweight the votes of ten million Conservians.
But isn’t this incredibly racist and unrealistic? An entire nation of people whose votes skew 90% Republican? No. African-Americans’ votes have historically been around 90% Democratic (93% in the last election). Latinos went over 70% Democratic in the last election. For comparison, white people were about 60% Republicans. If there had been no Mexican immigration to the United States over the past few decades, Romney would probaby have won the last election.
Is it wrong for a liberal citizen of Berkeley in 2013 to want to close the hyperborder with Conservia so that California doesn’t become part of the Bible Belt and Republicans don’t get guaranteed presidencies forever? Would that citizen be racist for even considering this? If not, then pity the poor conservative, who is actually in this exact situation right now.
(a real Reactionary would hasten to add this is more proof that progressives control everything. Because immigration favors progressivism, any opposition to it is racist, but the second we discover the hyperborder with Conservia, the establishment will figure out some reason why allowing immigration is racist. Maybe they can call it “inverse colonialism” or something.)
None of this is an argument against immigration. It’s an argument against immigration by groups with bad Luck and with noticeably different values than the average American. Let any Japanese person who wants move over. Same with the Russians, and the Jews, and the Indians. Heck, it’s not even like it’s saying no Afghans – if they swear on a stack of Korans that they’re going to try to learn English and not do any honor killings, they could qualify as well.
The United States used to have a policy sort of like this. It was called the Immigration Act of 1924. Its actual specifics were dumb, because it banned for example Asians and Jews, but the principle behind it – groups with good outcomes and who are a good match for our values can immigrate as much as they want, everyone else has a slightly harder time – seems broadly wise. So of course progressives attacked it as racist and Worse Than Hitler and it got repealed in favor of the current policy: everyone has a really hard time immigrating but if anyone sneaks over the border under cover of darkness we grant them citizenship anyway because not doing that would be mean.
Once again, coming up with a fair and rational immigration policy wouldn’t require some incredibly interventionist act of state control. It would just require that we notice the hole we’ve been deliberately sticking ourselves in and stop digging.”
I find it sort of weird that this post assumes that diversity-loving people have never lived in the South and in fact find Southerners unspeakably alien and repulsive
like to me this is like “imagine if a town were full of people like your mom’s family and your ex-girlfriend???? THE HORROR”
Yeah, this already exists inside the US and I grew up there. It’s 45 minutes west of here. I responded by moving away, and I continue to endorse that as the correct action.
if they took over the entire country, I would move to Canada.
That doesn’t work if some cultures and ideologies are more viral than others. In case you didn’t notice, Britain recently had a white man stage a van attack on unarmed Muslims leaving a mosque. Oppressive white supremacy?
Well, it happened in an environment of Muslims frequently conducting van and knife attacks on non-Muslims throughout Europe. It wasn’t just some isolated incident, it was an underdeveloped-country-style ethnic revenge killing.
Justified? No. But “make it easier for everyone to move around” set the stage for it to happen. All that moving is completely worthless if the problems can just follow you to whereever you and your economically productive capability go.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.
If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.
Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.
The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.
You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
“Let’s imagine an idyllic socialist utopia with a population of 100,000. In Utopia, everyone eats healthy organic food, respects the environment and one another, lives in harmony with people of other races, and is completely non-violent. One day, the Prime Minister decides to open up immigration to Americans and discourage them from assimilating.
50,000 Americans come in and move into a part of Utopia that quickly becomes known as Americatown. They bring their guns, their McDonalds, their megachurches, and their racism.
Soon, some Utopians find their family members dying in the crossfire between American street gangs. The megachurches convert a large portion of the Utopians to evangelical Christianity, and it becomes very difficult to get abortions without being harassed and belittled. Black and homosexual Utopians find themselves the target of American hatred, and worse, some young Utopians begin to get affected by American ideas and treat them the same way. American litter fills the previously pristine streets, and Americans find some loopholes in the water quality laws and start dumping industrial waste into the rivers.
By the time society has settled down, we have a society which is maybe partway between Utopia and America. The Americans are probably influenced by Utopian ideas and not quite as bad as their cousins who reminded behind in the States, but the Utopians are no longer as idyllic as their Utopian forefathers, and have inherited some of America’s problems.
Would it be racist for a Utopian to say “Man, I wish we had never let the Americans in?” Would it be hateful to suggest that the borders be closed before even more Americans can enter?
If you are a culturalist, no. Utopian culture is better, at least by Utopian standards, than American culture. Although other cultures can often contribute to enrich your own, there is no law of nature saying that only the good parts of other cultures will transfer over and that no other culture can be worse than yours in any way. The Americans were clearly worse than the Utopians, and it was dumb of the Utopians to let so many Americans in without any safeguards.
Likewise, there are countries that are worse than America. Tribal Afghanistan seems like a pretty good example. Pretty much everything about tribal Afghanistan is horrible. Their culture treats women as property, enforces sharia law, and contains honor killings as a fact of life. They tend to kill apostate Muslims and non-Muslims a lot. Not all members of Afghan tribes endorse these things, but the average Afghan tribesperson is much more likely to endorse them than the average American. If we import a bunch of Afghan tribesmen, their culture is likely to make America a worse place in the same way that American culture makes Utopia a worse place.
But it’s actually much worse than this. We are a democracy. Anyone who moves here and gains citizenship eventually gets the right to vote. People with values different from ours vote for people and laws different from those we would vote for. Progressives have traditionally viewed any opposition to this as anti-immigrant and racist – and, by total coincidence, most other countries, and therefore most immigrants, are progressive.
Imagine a country called Conservia, a sprawling empire of a billion people that has a fifth-dimensional hyperborder with America. The Conservians are all evangelical Christians who hate abortion, hate gays, hate evolution, and believe all government programs should be cut.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Conservians hop the hyperborder fence and enter America, and sympathetic presidents then pass amnesty laws granting them citizenship. As a result, the area you live – or let’s use Berkeley, the area I live – gradually becomes more conservative. First the abortion clinics disappear, as Conservian protesters start harassing them out of business and a government that must increasingly pander to Conservians doesn’t stop them. Then gay people stop coming out of the closet, as Conservian restaurants and businesses refuse to serve them and angry Conservian writers and journalists create an anti-gay climate. Conservians vote 90% Republican in elections, so between them and the area’s native-born conservatives the Republicans easily get a majority and begin defunding public parks, libraries, and schools. Also, Conservians have one pet issue which they promote even more intently than the destruction of secular science – that all Conservians illegally in the United States must be granted voting rights, and that no one should ever block more Conservians from coming to the US.
Is this fair to the native Berkeleyans? It doesn’t seem that way to me. And what if 10 million Conservians move into America? That’s not an outrageous number – there are more Mexican immigrants than that. But it would be enough to have thrown every single Presidential election of the past fifty years to the Republicans – there has never been a Democratic candidate since LBJ who has won the native population by enough of a margin to outweight the votes of ten million Conservians.
But isn’t this incredibly racist and unrealistic? An entire nation of people whose votes skew 90% Republican? No. African-Americans’ votes have historically been around 90% Democratic (93% in the last election). Latinos went over 70% Democratic in the last election. For comparison, white people were about 60% Republicans. If there had been no Mexican immigration to the United States over the past few decades, Romney would probaby have won the last election.
Is it wrong for a liberal citizen of Berkeley in 2013 to want to close the hyperborder with Conservia so that California doesn’t become part of the Bible Belt and Republicans don’t get guaranteed presidencies forever? Would that citizen be racist for even considering this? If not, then pity the poor conservative, who is actually in this exact situation right now.
(a real Reactionary would hasten to add this is more proof that progressives control everything. Because immigration favors progressivism, any opposition to it is racist, but the second we discover the hyperborder with Conservia, the establishment will figure out some reason why allowing immigration is racist. Maybe they can call it “inverse colonialism” or something.)
None of this is an argument against immigration. It’s an argument against immigration by groups with bad Luck and with noticeably different values than the average American. Let any Japanese person who wants move over. Same with the Russians, and the Jews, and the Indians. Heck, it’s not even like it’s saying no Afghans – if they swear on a stack of Korans that they’re going to try to learn English and not do any honor killings, they could qualify as well.
The United States used to have a policy sort of like this. It was called the Immigration Act of 1924. Its actual specifics were dumb, because it banned for example Asians and Jews, but the principle behind it – groups with good outcomes and who are a good match for our values can immigrate as much as they want, everyone else has a slightly harder time – seems broadly wise. So of course progressives attacked it as racist and Worse Than Hitler and it got repealed in favor of the current policy: everyone has a really hard time immigrating but if anyone sneaks over the border under cover of darkness we grant them citizenship anyway because not doing that would be mean.
Once again, coming up with a fair and rational immigration policy wouldn’t require some incredibly interventionist act of state control. It would just require that we notice the hole we’ve been deliberately sticking ourselves in and stop digging.”
I find it sort of weird that this post assumes that diversity-loving people have never lived in the South and in fact find Southerners unspeakably alien and repulsive
like to me this is like “imagine if a town were full of people like your mom’s family and your ex-girlfriend???? THE HORROR”
It was necessary to pick an outgroup that wouldn’t immediately be used to signal for Woke Points within moments after the reader started reading it. You’re acting like I haven’t read how “diversity-loving people” responded in the wake of the election and in general.
Marrying your cousin - mockworthy when rednecks do it, cultural diversity that must be respected when other groups do it.
High religiosity - oppressive when rednecks do it, cultural diversity when other groups do it.
Accent - mockworthy when rednecks do it, cultural diversity when other groups do it.
Elevated crime rates - terrible and a sign of white supremacy when rednecks do it, the results of discrimination and poverty for other groups.
Class - fair game to pick on for rednecks, not for other groups.
Ethnic violence & terrorist attacks - oppressive white supremacy when rednecks do it, “part and parcel of living in a big city” when other groups do it.
So if, in general, “diversity-loving people” act like they find rednecks repulsive and unspeakably alien, but give a pass on the same behaviors by other groups, then it makes sense to use rednecks as the example, even if not literally all “diversity-loving people” are #woke enough to post about how they hate everyone who has ever owned something with a Confederate flag on it.
We just recently had a round of Discourse on rattumb (or at least Ranma did) on the ideology behind those Robert E. Lee statues.
I mean, what am I supposed to do, pick a foreign immigrant group that practices sex trafficking at a much higher rate? “Diversity-loving people” already swept exactly that under the rug on purpose.
The other surprising thing about Amenta is that apparently there’s a lot of people who want to RP as social conservatives, even though they themselves are (probably) not social conservatives. As an actual IRL social conservative, I wouldn’t have expected this to be a thing that people would do.
Dude, RPing as a social liberal is the easiest thing in the world. I could elaborate on why I found it surprising that people wanted to do the reverse, but you for some reason make your response un-rebloggable, so I think this part of the conversation is kind of done.
Presumably it mostly leans on “thinking X isn’t harmful”, which shouldn’t be that hard to simulate depending on just how Socon you are.
But as you can tell from my blog, I’m not really a Socon. Yet. They haven’t moved the line far enough yet.
There’s a well-documented attitude where humans will twist themselves into mental knots trying to come up with reasons why death or work are actually good. The thing is, even the anti-deathists (looking at you, Big Yud) will turn around and do the exact same thing about suffering, telling themselves that OF COURSE humans need suffering to be happy (just like *~death gives meaning to life~*, right?).
We COULD be working on destroying the hedonic treadmill, or making a version of MDMA without tolerance or negative side effects, or figuring out how to make wireheading work without interfering with our ability to earn a living, but instead we’ve decided to make all of that illegal.
I still haven’t seen Inside Out yet, but I get the sense that I would hate it, since really Sadness needs to be taken out behind the toolshed and put out of her misery, and out of the misery of her host.
The sensation of physical pain. I asked wirehead actually but that was a rhetorical question so I will answer.
Pain is the body signalling “something is wrong!”. It’s of course very unpleasant, and thus technically “bad”. On top of that, the human body doesn’t deal with it all that well: it keeps telling us something is wrong when we are already aware, misreports the damage, etc.
There are people who don’t feel pain. They don’t live long.
Even every human having the ability to flip the switch to say “hey, I’m aware something is wrong, got it, bye” might have catastrophic consequences when the social expectation for manual laborers becomes “ignore the pain forever”.
Sadness is most likely exactly like that, and intentionally experiencing sadness is much more of a universal human experience.
Yep.
I think abolishing suffering kind of includes “abolish need for manual labor” as a sub-point… Just a slight hunch.
#FullyAutomatedLuxuryCommunism
#MouseUtopiaHereWeCome
Okay, but major depression and chronic pain are probably both pretty worthless, as compared to, say, the feelings of loneliness and dejectedness one might have in an exotic relationship type one has entered for ideological reasons, or the fatigue one gets to signal it’s time to stop exercising.
Also we should unbundle chest pain so it’s easier to diagnose heart attack vs just other issues. (Or slap a monitor on it. You get the idea.)
Actually, the reason that lusting after anime girls is degenerate is that the offspring would have a mix of 2D and 3D traits, and would not be well-adapted to either the 2D or 3D environments, putting them at a significant disadvantage.
Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.
Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.
I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.
Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?
You could do it in far fewer generations, but you’d have to install a 20-year military governorship, still ban cousin marriages out to the third degree, enforce village exogamy, and seize total control of the educational system to wipe out non-trivial parts of the culture and replace them with ideology necessary to support Liberal Democracy.
That’s a pretty big ideological price, and it would require a long troop presence to enforce.
It’s hardly impossible. Afghanistan was liberalizing at one point. But if you’re too hooked on the ideology that democracy flowers in all soils, it isn’t possible for you to carry it out.
The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.
Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.
Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.
How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?
What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.
No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.
Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch
Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet
Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes
Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew!
Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.
This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.
You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.
This is why I believe more roles should go not just to asian female bodybuilders, but to tall female MMA fighters of all races.
You know how much state effort it took to make Yao Ming?
You know how much effort it takes to make a single Dinka herdsman?
Also, the former wears out after a few seasons. We’re talking about phenotypic bell curves that essentially do not overlap.
I’m like 70% joking. I realize the upper body strength difference is almost bimodal, even at the athlete level.
But I’m like 30% not joking, because if you want to close the gap in visual plausibility of beating up a man, this looks like a lot more force is going to rain down than this.
Fantasizing about having institutional power seems like a loosing proposition. Best case, you wind up disappointed. Worst case, you wind up with institutional power.
The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.
Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.
Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.
How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?
What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.
No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.
Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch
Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet
Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes
Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew!
Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.
This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.
You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.
This is why I believe more roles should go not just to asian female bodybuilders, but to tall female MMA fighters of all races.
The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.
Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.
Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.
How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?
What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.
No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.
Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch
Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet
Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes
Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew!
Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.
This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.
You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.
Counter-point: All female characters engaging in waif fu are actually paramilitary cyborgs.
It is important to acknowledge this for the benefit of cyborg representation.
Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.
Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.
I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.
Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?
ten dollars says she’s going to twist me pointing out that ada lovelace did not actually invent the computer or programming and therefore men have actually contributed to the development of computers in some way as misogyny somehow
that she made not just significant but seminal (heh) contributions to computer programming. There’s no convincing evidence that Babbage actually wrote her notes about computing the Bernoulli numbers. She was also from a family of wacky geniuses. It’s not unreasonable to call het the mother of computer programming or something like that.
Hobbes, Pascal or Leibniz may also have been the mother of computer programming, if you look at it a certain way, or Babbage or Gauss.
Contributions to computer programming != wrote the first program
The problem here is that all of rat-tumb agrees on the scope of the actual contribution of Ada Lovelace to the history of computing and to the programs to calculate Bernoulli numbers in particular (http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html). We are just arguing semantics here.
Outside of rat-tumb, some people don’t know anybody else other than Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing (from that movie with Benedict Cumberbatch). What about Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Vannevar Bush, Emil Leon Post, Alonzo Church, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann? Grace Hopper or Barbara Liskov might be better candidates for “Women who invented modern computing”.
Outside of rat-tumb, what does it even matter if she did or did not predict symbolic theorem-provers over a hundred years early? Does it matter if you don’t know what a compiler is, but have strong feelings about the subject anyway?
Is the Bernoulli numbers program a computer program? Did she write it? Did anything before it count as a computer program?
Those questions settle the debate. They’re just super hard to answer in a concrete way.
Yes. No. Probably.
You didn’t read the wolfram excerpt I linked to if you really think she didn’t write the program.
So Menabrea did not?
Nope. He wrote about the engine, but it was her notes that contained the first program. Read the Wolfram article.
Ok. Menabrea wrote something non-Bernoulli as an example program, but suggested Bernoulli numbers. Ada Lovelace published the first computer program. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, if you set the cutoff right.
While the phrase “no homo” is traditionally frowned upon by the LGBT community, I think it’s actually a wonderful way to contextualize affirmations as entirely platonic, and we should let the straights have it in exchange for us using “no hetero” when delivering affirmations to the opposite sex
Something to think about, but I don’t think it’ll catch on.
Yes, we get it, you’re a centrist with no logical consistency.
so i go to this website, not even having a good time to begin with, and you come on my blog and call me a centrist with your own two stumpy hands
Obviously you just need to go up several tiers of Centrism and seek world conquest under your new radical centrist government. No one will see it coming, because all centrists are boring wishy-washies, right?
The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Remember that post about how a black reverse Indiana Jones would be great because it would “piss off white guys”?
They know it’s just culture war to take over stuff they currently have for its symbolic value.
If it weren’t just culture war, then it would be about the creation of new media, new stories, rather than insisting “nope, this guy looks too much like you, and you oppress people just by existing, so he must be removed.”
There is already a good test case to differentiate.
Look for people who objected to the idea of a black stormtrooper as a main character in the new Star Wars. As a new Star Wars movie, it wasn’t replacing anyone from the previous movies, therefore you can assume more bad faith of the people who were against having Finn there. (Also the movie is actually enjoyable in itself and the acting was fine.)
Also, they know this sort of stuff only goes one way.
Also also, recall that criticism of the new Ghostbusters that flopped was, to a degree, socially prohibited because it was “girl power!”. But it still flopped. Why wouldn’t a lot of people be suspicious?
“Out of the cities” ? Do you really think people who spend their time watching anime and playing video games are more likely to find people they like in far less densely populated places?
Or is this just another case of “these people would be so much happier if they just had different preferences”
It would actually be possible for them to shift some of their preferences a bit, most likely, but it would require an enormous amount of work, as hidden in the task of “getting them off the internet” - no easy feat!
And by the time you did that, they’d be less likely to be incels.
Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.
Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.
