You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in
which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in
choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means
using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low
performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that
had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning
efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in
fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in
removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state
and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent
newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not
unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation
has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic
penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when
a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with
a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages
and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements
and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social
comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in
China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in
middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel
(including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable -
892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790
in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by
international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual
cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost
two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income
developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares
with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’tsocialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.
This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.
Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.
Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.
The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.
Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)
But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.
You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.
After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.
I am… really really troubled by the idea that “monogamous ideology” exists. Or that if you don’t have a bad ideology, you have “poly ideology,” even if you have said “FUCK OFF, I’M NOT POLY” more than once.
Anti-poly ideology exists, yes.
But monogamy can mean anything from “I am attracted to one person at a time” to “I want three girlfriends but think God must hate me” to “more just sounds like a brain-breaking logistical nightmarish time suck, I’m good” to “you know, in practice I only ever dated one person at a time.”
The idea that that adds up to an ideology is why I… feel perhaps more suspicious than I should of loud poly people.
I don’t date one person at a time to spite people who don’t. I do it because I don’t like sensory overload.
I feel you did not read this post.
The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”
The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.
Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.
If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.
Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.
(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)
Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.
There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.
You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.
(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)
I can and will tell anyone if I find their partner cheating. I can and will ostracize people from my social groups for cheating. I can and will abandon anyone that knows if my partner is cheating and fails to inform me. Fuck the ideology. I’m physically instantiating my own reality, whether they want me to or not.
The people behind this shift have no idea what it is that they’re unleashing.
y’all need a Tumblr safeword; I’ve been interpreting your regular screams of “please stop / bad post op / delete your account / blocked and reported” as countersignalling hyperbole between friends and doubling down.
get off this site. tumblr is for humans and human-derived semi-artificial constructs, NOT BIRDS
#the iron hand - the State #the invisible fist - Capitalism #the red hammer - Communism #thx xhxhxhx - you know who you are @xhxhxhx #chronofelony - time travel #mitigated future - futurism #art+#oc - hand-made, free-range, gluten-free, organic, locally-sourced PNGs #shtpost - quality, 100% serious post, always repost this #politics - elaborate joke post, never repost this
#trump cw - self-filter tag for anti-memeist bigots who are prejudiced against our first Meme-American President due to the orange color of his skin
#discourse preview 2019 - retrocausal posts from the New Mexico Timeline
#nationalism - posts banned under the 2089 Human Dignity Act of the Earth Sphere Federation, filtering these is recommended for normies and anyone who isn’t a NatSep
#augmented reality break - (alternate (reality) break) tag intersection, but with coffee so it’s better and therefore augmented (like me)
Future Tags (Vegas Timeline):
#this week on woke or broke - exciting new youtube show in which contestants try to guess what is social justice orthodoxy and what was cooked up by the producers. failing contestants are fired from their jobs
#miti draws dallas - performance art piece in which thousands of teleoperated drones are released in a swarm over Dallas, Texas, and pictures of frightened and heavily-armed Texans are posted to Tumblr in five minute intervals
#super love love demon battle - SLLDB fandom drama. eventually boils over into discussion of the SLLDB fandom murders
#HobbesWasRight - series of articles laying out the philosophical groundwork for Googlezon Dynamics’ Leviathan Project and its benefits for the security of the state and the populace
#dogs - dog photos and canine cybernetic augmentations. also ferrets, to go with the ferret mistagging fad
#national technocracy - hypothetical point within the N-dimensional ideospace lattice originally theorized by RAND Geospatial Dynamics Working Group in the 1950s, generally summarized as “that thing that comes after prediction markets”, many researchers dispute whether it can actually exist. abandoned by Silicon Valley CEOs in favor of a system based on Facebook likes.
#dogfree - actual dog photos, just dog photos
Future Tags (Montana Timeline):
No tags for this timeline, possibly unstable. Radsuit suggested.
New Tags:
#the mitigated exhibition - collection of 2-dimensional pixel arrays hand-crafted by Tibetan space monks (according to product packaging)
#one thousand villages - militarized bus maps and civil defense planning for the city of Springrock, Arkowa
#urban planning - development plans for Hypersuburb One
#gendpol - (exploration of) Neurotype Space with Social Characteristics
#racepol - unsuspecting visitors are painted exciting new colours in this avant-garde art installation
#otv game - greyskin politics discussion tag
#私 - 自分がない。
#ミチは日本語を話します。 - Non-existent post category. Forget you ever saw this.
#this is a joke - leaked document from the Trump Administration, forward to WaPo & HuffBuzz
#the year is - descriptions for movies retroactively deleted from the timestream
#flagpost - stealth post, only you can see it (yes you, specifically)
Future Tags (Boston Timeline):
#orly - series of interviews with rogue VN AI Orliana Reilly
#owlpocalypse2k18 - Melbourne comes to a halt as experimental Google mosquito suppression project causes owl duplication glitch and residents are lagged off of the server
#the coming mouse utopia - new tag originates following dramatic shift in Alt Right interests towards mouse ethnostate, surprising all observers (except me)
#baka baka baka - flagging tag for bot which prints out all mitigated chaos Tumblr posts and air drops them inside the US Congress building
Also, it’s surprising that the fact that as many as one in five women may have a condition which results in elevated androgen levels almost never comes up in the gender discourse. Like, here we are debating about whether hormones have an impact on cognition and development, and if so, what that might be, and meanwhile the distribution of androgens is not uniform within women as a sex!
“men and women have statistically different preferences” is a statement universally acknowledged and incredibly controversial at the same time
probably the dissonance is resolved by carefully distinguishing actual men and women (who have statistically differing preferences due to existing in this fallen world and being shaped and moulded by society into the twisted creations that we see all around us) and the Platonic ideal of men and women, who are equal in every way and have identical preferences and behaviour at a statistical level.
admission time: I think that some of the gender forbidden shadowspeech is probably true for a sizeable chunk, once you’ve removed the lesbians, the gays, the bisexuals, transgender individuals, queers, asexuals, autistics, adhders, those with PCOS… basically anyone who has a good reason that they might differ from main plan. (as many as 1/5th of women may have PCOS for instance - not a trivial number)
lmao pathetic fascist retards like you who don't know how to actually interact with people and will die nobodies having contributed nothing to society shouldn't argue or even dare to talk to people clearly better than them and with not shitty politics. go kill yourself in the forest so at least your death will serve some purpose in feeding the animals and enriching the earth.
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.
