I can see the point in that changing the composition of a democracy will change change the composition of the decision making apparatus.
But there is one more difference I can say there is between the US and Europe. We are literally just definitionally immigrants. The country has always been a place that people immigrate to because it offers opportunities and advantages. I’d have to be convinced that there is some compelling reason that right now is the unique moment in time where it’s correct to stand up and yell stop.
And I don’t really see much unique about right now. People on this forum I suspect would be quick to jump out and say, but now they’re not Europeans that’s the problem! But that’s something that’s unique to now, we’ve had non-European immigration going on for many decades and they’ve integrated just fine. We have chinatowns and neighborhoods where you can get authentic tacos and not much that I see that’s genuinely bad to show for it.
Was there some severe problem that immigration caused in the past in the US? I don’t really think so and so I’m not one of the jump around and yell stop people.
Good luck! Again the US isn't Europe, our immigration problems tend to be pretty different. Most immigration here seems to be from Latam and India. If the question instead was like, what if your country was 40% latino? I mean... I don't really care. I'm from the southwest that's already the case, lol. One of my favorite parts of the US is walking around Miami and you have an Argentinian bakery next to a pupusa joint next to a Colombian restaurant and a Jamaican place, and when you walk into a store they greet you with a buenos dias.
These guys will likely have my back against this supposed muslim takeover anyway!
Jesweez
1mo ago
I don't think the US would be in a position to have that many muslims, the world is a big place and most of the people in it aren't muslim.
I do dislike abrahamic religions that try to dominate politics so I see the rationale for being concerned about becoming eventually dominated by followers of one. However, that doesn't mean I want to close all immigration. Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.
And I think Europe has different problems regarding immigration than the US does, being right next to the middle east and in former colonial relationships with other muslim countries.
I want more immigration for selfish reasons. Because in the modern times, countries which import people will have more robust economies than those who just peter out and invert their demographic pyramids.
And as opposed to the increasingly common right wing concerns, I don't care about living in a diverse place, I actually enjoy it. I like to eat different foods and I'm a big language learning nerd, so its cool to practice people's languages with them. I believe in importing highly skilled people from all over the planet as the way to build a powerful country. (Although I'm fine with mid level immigrants too, small business owners, chefs, whatever!).
America has benefitted enormously from stealing the top percentile of almost every other country on the planet and these fools in government currently want to do everything to end that system and turn us into a declining backwater former power like the UK. Cutting funding for science, ceding our position in the world we built, and tearing up the good will that we have from other countries is the icing on the cake.
I'm going to steal right wingers framing here but I seriously think this is the case. What right wingers want to do is profoundly dysgenic, they want us to stop siphoning talent from the world and instead close ourselves off. So instead of being, idk, a bubbling cauldron of human potential like a New York City or a Cambridge Massachusetts, they want us to become more like Appalachia. Closed off, greying, clinging to dying industries, old modes of life, lacking in dynamism in a competitive world, and with a bad reputation everywhere else.
It's not really in my interests, that one!
Hopefully more liberals learn to talk like me instead of only the bleeding heart thing, that would also be in our interest.
I've never known sadistic to have a definitionally sexual component. I always understood it to mean taking pleasure from seeing others be harmed, somewhat similar to schadenfreude but more intense.
So what I mean is that the desire for justice often has a component where people want to see the perpetrator be harmed as retribution, sometimes severely.
Like, beheading thousands of people during the French revolution, that was justice steeped in sadism.
Jesweez
1mo ago
You don't think I believe that there are people in a comment section who refuse to admit that the other side might have done something they'd otherwise agree with?
“Enormous propaganda machine”… or alternatively, a few people you disagree with in a comment section.
Partisan commenters always refuse to admit there could have been some good things done by people they disagree with. Nothing out of the ordinary there.
Jesweez
1mo ago
What’s been done to the modal citizen exactly?
I’m often just deeply surprised at what feels like absolutely nothing to me to other people they seem to take as some existential life defining offense.
Jesweez
1mo ago
The desire for justice is often sadistic.
It’s a pretty common societal failure mode.
Jesweez
1mo ago
I think that’s probably true and it’s some weird epiphenomenon of the human condition for whatever reason.
It doesn’t mean I’m going to cheer on the slide back into it.
Jesweez
1mo ago
I’m extremely averse to all of this and I’ll tell you why.
It’s been a common trope that once the generation who knows war firsthand dies out then the naive people left behind will get the itch and repeat the horrors again for a new generation.
And right on schedule, the WW2 generation has finally died out and we’ve now got all three major military powers talking about annexation of territories for the glory of it.
You’ll probably say, but we’d only do things peacefully! No way current MAGA would ever launch a war of conquest!
And that’s comforting for me to believe and it might even be true, but the problem is that you’ve all done away with the Overton window so thoroughly that I have no functioning means of predicting just how far outside of it things might go.
A few months ago it would have been crazy to suggest that Trump would ever talk about taking foreign territory. He’s the isolationist America first guy! A few days ago it would have been ridiculous to suggest that Trump would ever talk about taking over Gaza. Sure Greenland sounds cool but Gaza, but come on, that one is wild.
I’m getting tired, boss, and it’s because I no longer have any functioning mental model of just how far people who want to expand the Overton window want to go. And the direction that it seems to be getting pulled in is one that triggers my “these guys might be the type to fuck around and repeat the horrors” sense. Sure no one sets out to do that, but it’s easy to imagine us getting drawn slowly along a road bad road. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon the window might get yanked back over there again.
It seems that no matter how crazy I think something might be, once it happens there’s masses of people who will come to argue for it and why it’s suddenly based, even if they wouldn’t have done so a week ago had I suggested the same idea.
Basically I don’t trust y’all with the window. I’ve graduated from my idealistic youth stage to now become conservative to slow down further changes to the Overton window until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
Jesweez
1mo ago
His recent obsession with acquiring foreign territory is really strange. It’s been two weeks, and already there’s 4 or so territories that he’s consistently talking about trying to take.
I don’t know but I’m starting to set my assumption toward there being something even more wrong with his brain than I previously thought rather than him doing this in a posturing way or to get some kind of outcome.
I know Trump is just uniquely Trump but even for him this is getting pretty out there.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Objectively he spends nearly 100% of his time promoting right wing ideas
To be fair he throws in some space stuff as well
Jesweez
2mo ago
You’re not really doing the “no innovations came from basic publicly funded scientific research” thing?
Let’s just take biology: CRISPR, the polymerase chain reaction, green fluorescent protein, huge numbers of basic discoveries that inform things like cancer therapy research, discoveries of new classes of drug such as discovering GLP-1s in Gila Monster saliva, surely one could write a book on all the contributions of the last couple decades.
That’s a ridiculous opinion that basic science with the support of public funding hasn’t contributed anything lately.
I do fear for my area of study to be honest.
To doxx myself, I study ecosystems with satellites. I develop models that link what we see in earth observation pixels with how much water is in vegetation.
The problem is that this is something which is verifiably being changed due to climate change, and with that I’m now in political waters.
I think earth science is definitely on the chopping block. Doesn’t seem to be in republicans vision of what we should invest in as a country.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!
We’ll see if the United States decides to continue being a scientific powerhouse or if we’ll all get chased away to other countries..
Jesweez
2mo ago
Do you think citizens in Afghanistan suffered hardship during the US occupation?
Seems like something that’s still in place today to an extent.
People of the multinational upper class often feel more kinship with one another even though they’re from different countries than they do with the lower class people in their own country.
This is honestly true in my own life. I’m in grad school. My friends are from all over the world. I have a lot more in common with them although they’re from Iran and China and Ecuador than I do with people even in my own family in the US who never left their hometown and whose thinking and interests in life are very foreign to my own.
It’s sort of a self sorting by intellect and interests.
I gather this is what is meant by “globalists”.
the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language
Is what the intelligent wing of the modern right wants basically equivalent to what the old European nationalists were trying to do?
Jesweez
2mo ago
It's no good to say that the progressive left and the far-right are similar. They have markedly different goals in most respects
It’s funny you said this because as I was reading I internally was thinking that everything you wrote up to this point I could barely distinguish from a socialist.
Jesweez
2mo ago
That’s like saying, well your relatives aren’t in the taliban, how would a prolonged counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan even effect them?
Jesweez
2mo ago
Yes. I have family there through marriage. This would be pretty much the worst thing to happen in my adult life, for my country to invade the country of the other half of my family.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Latin American countries tend to be very centralized and tend to have large amounts of territory where the state has very little presence, direct analogy to what the American West was like back in the day.
In addition to the vast desert regions of the north, another factor is that Mexico is one of the most consistently mountainous countries in the world. The entire country is basically two large mountain chains with some major population centers in different valleys in the central region.
There’s a reason that what El Salvador did is extremely hard to replicate in other Latin American countries. El Salvador is basically a large city state centered on San Salvador, while a country like Mexico is in a whole different universe of challenges for any similar approach.
Yeah, and then the cartels move shop to Colombia and we invade Colombia, then they move to Peru and we invade Peru, another global war on terror, another trillion dollars playing whack a mole for a decade plus, just to get outlasted once again and withdrawal, hooray
Sorry it makes you feel that way.
I imagine there must have been people who felt the same in Rome at the height of its power. There were people from all over the empire living in the city. To me that’s just what comes from being the dominant country in the world and particularly one which formed by shouting “come migrate here, it’s great!” to the rest of the world.
Ethnic strife might happen but it’s not really new either. My grandpa grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Chicago, and as kids they would fight with the other kids from the Irish neighborhood and the Polish neighborhood. He hated Polacks as he would call them. Funny enough, he then married a half Polack girl and then his daughter married a full Polish dude and they now have the most Polish surname in existence. Now he just says the Polack thing as a joke, but he gets along really well with my Polish as fuck uncle.
This was all quite recent. But in time these identities just blended into the background of America and stopped mattering. Now you just see “Chinese” and “Mexican” and “Italian” and “Korean” people, and meanwhile they’re just undeniably culturally American because they’ve been here for generations. They’ll say stuff like “I’m Italian!” or “I’m Mexican!” while actual Europeans or Mexicans roll their eyes and laugh to themselves saying, bro, no you’re not. They’re right, they just became Americans. Same BS as the rest of us.
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