Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[discoursedrome]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mutant-aesthetic]

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

[mitigatedchaos]

How would that even work?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[anaisnein]

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.)

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[truffledmadness]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

> 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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[notebookundermydesk]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[drethelin]

“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.”

[transgirlkyloren]

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”

[fermatas-theorem]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

#I understand that not everyone can move around to avoid this kind of problem#the solution to that is also ‘make it easier for everyone to move around’

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.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[nocherrybombs]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[nuclearspaceheater]

I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.

[mitigatedchaos]

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?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[nocherrybombs]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Have you ever been so reactionary that you proposed an aristocracy where aristocratic status is lost if they don’t marry in new national hero figures at least every three generations?