Even putting aside that not everyone is the US with a ton of materiel sitting around*, why would you do this? This risks destroying already fragile states, and then there's nobody to negotiate with. There are ways to pressure nations like Somalia - no aid, cutting off remittances - that don't rise to this level.
And, of course, if you are cutting out human rights law (the real problem) there's nothing stopping you from dumping them in whatever third country will have them (e.g. Rwanda) and then turning a blind eye to how they handle them (most likely drive them back home with "incentives").
* Remember Libya? And those were countries that maintained some military capacity.
Tanista
3hr ago
Well, the worst drop in Israel's approval happened following an attack that was serious so I wouldn't say "barely". But, in any case, that's because Israel has the misfortune of being plopped right amongst the very nations Palestinians can inflame the most and depends on foreign support to survive there. And the foreign support it depends upon is now suspect because of ,in part, Muslim migration into many of those European countries.
The situation is different for America and even for a hypothetical low-migration Europe. There would still be important levers - like the oil embargoes of the past - but we can question if we'd see the same impact.
Nationalism and immigration don’t need to conflict: nationalism and large-scale immigration can’t work except with a large suppressed underclass, but a small ratio of immigrants can be patriotic (towards their host) and the host culture’s identity and cohesion can remain.
I agree, but it's unlikely to be much relevant. Large scale immigration is going to be the policy, because industrialized populations stopped having kids. This is one reason the ruling class feel they cannot stop. There is not going to be any sort of post-Ellis Island pause-and-assimilate because the demographic conditions are just going to get worse and worse.
Similarly, the demands of the asylum system make large scale immigration the most likely outcome, and immigration from adversely selected migrants at that.
A large ratio of the population supports at least some immigration
I'll grant it. But A strong plurality want significantly less immigration and you should also factor in the fact that most people aren't political junkies and don't actually know how many migrants are being let in. IIRC, in Harper's time Canadians consistently underestimated it and being informed, dropped their support for immigration. When Trudeau made it undeniable it nearly destroyed the Liberals.
Britain has consistently voted for right wing parties and causes, people simply haven't gotten what they wanted.
I'm sure plenty of people would like some moderate solution that resolved the issue without maximal unpleasantness, but that's not what happens. Now they're trending more and more to the extremes to resolve it.
My understanding is that most people are unhappy because their economy is failing, institutions are overwhelmed, culture is broken…all problems worsened and maybe primarily caused by immigration, but I doubt extreme remigration will solve them. Reducing corruption, improving police enforcement, and moderate immigration reform would at least improve them.
You're just asserting this though. It's not always about something else, sometimes people just don't want migrants. Now, Westerners know that it's taboo to say this but it's not actually odd. Outside of the West nations like Japan take far fewer migrants than the Bryan Caplans of the world insist would be good for them. South Africans complain about Nigerian migrants. Britons complained about Polish migrants who I bet they'd now take gladly. People also just don't like migration and the sense that their culture is slipping away. That's a part of the equation that can't be written off to talk about other things. The left-wing view that all problems that come from tribes interacting are just atavistic interpretations of an underlying material issue is an ideological precept, not a fact.
This is precisely why the pro-migrant establishment is not trusted by nationalists: a nationalist cannot say "I just want my country to stay similar to its past and to continue to primarily represent my group", they will be told what other, more legitimate reasons they can have to complain.
But even on the purely material plane there are issues that would be solved by just strangling the importation or removing certain groups. It is a matter of fact that many immigrant groups never pay for themselves due to disproportionate welfare usage.. Removing them would solve this fiscal problem, preventing more of them would ameliorate it. Many immigrant groups have a higher rate of crime. Removing them would resolve this problem.
It's also a bit strange to act as if You Can Just Do Things, when immigration changes the very nature of the government. Is it possible that the reason one cannot fix these issues is that immigrant voting blocs can veto things they don't like? Is it possible the UK police behaves in what seems like absurd ways because the existence of ethnic blocs (and the risk of being considered racist towards them - which would be of lower salience in a more homogeneous country) make the "two-tier" behavior the path of least resistance?
If immigrants are changing the level of resistance you would face doing a thing it doesn't make sense to say that you can just improve things anyway while getting more immigration. They've manifestly failed to do that, and the more migration you have the harder it is.
On the other side, politicians who believe nationalism is intrinsically bad (or anti-immigrant) are wrong and should be voted out.
I mean, this is just a case-in-point of the problem: immigrants vote too, and people are able to understand that white guilt politicians are better for their interests. Obviously, for now, you can vote the Starmers out. Surely at some point that stops being viable? If so, how does that factor into your proposed solution of migration-but-more-moderate?
National identity and imports must be balanced for culture: too much national identity creates a waning culture of nostalgia, too much imports creates an incoherent diluted culture, only a good amount of both creates a culture that improves over time.
You're going to have to give me some example of the dangers of this supposed nostalgia, and maybe show why those dangers are worse than losing any sense of shared destiny/creating mutual ethnic strife and so on that we already see.
and increasing nationalism as a side-effect of addressing the elephant in the room: convincing most of the population to like their government (maybe by having it do something notable for the public and advertising it, and electing new parties with less out-of-touch politicians, even Örebro if they tone down remigration).
This runs into problems, because one of the things the public wants from its government is to be against immigration, which many governments can't be.
It also has deeper challenges because the government of European countries seem to have people who believe - with some justice - that nationalism is a reactionary force that can organize people against immigration and the new multicultural state. This is on top of their general tendency to see it as a bit low class and cringe.
This is why Starmer's attempts to seize patriotism rang a bit hollow; his supporters would be the ones to write worried op-eds about the spread of English flags in public. Before him, I don't think Sunak cared at all either way, that's why it didn't occur to him that missing the anniversary of D-Day would be an issue.
I do think we need some radical solution to fix societal decay, although it may emerge outside policy, like a technological breakthrough, or just younger generations replacing older ones and having a drastically different culture
Why would younger generations replacing new ones not accelerate the cultural decay? Older people can maintain a good status quo as well as a bad one.
Nice to see leftists divest themselves of their ideological cruft and try for new direction
Is it?
The Chomsky line is that the point of propaganda is not to tell you what to think, it's to determine the contours of the debate.
"You can't do remigration but we can do other various policy wonk things like 'better vetting'" is more or less the left-wing position already. I don't think remigration is going to happen, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't actually solve it.
"You can't do X Direct Thing, you must solve the Deeper Issue" is already the default left-wing response to anything. It's the response to the European heatwave: "Far from attacking the root causes of global-warming, activists said, recourse to la clim was merely attenuating the effects of global-warming."
It's the response to crime: you can't just arrest people, we have to look at the root causes etc.
It's the go-to.
I think cruel "work camps" will also not be most efficient: refugees will do the bare minimum, and learn to hate your country, which may haunt it later even if they're deported once their home country becomes stable (which may never happen anyways).
Does it actually matter? What vengeance will a stable Syria take?
This reminds of all of the "soft power" talk: there's never really a concrete explanation of the downside. It's one thing if we're talking about people from Hong Kong or China but most refugees don't come from countries whose opinion matters that much, quite frankly.
The Arabs use a bunch of us Third Worlders as human machinery and nothing has ever come of it (speaking from direct experience: their long history as slavers counts for fucking nothing amongst Africans who watch American slavery movies*). China is fucking over the Uighurs and they were defended by Saudi Arabia. Japan takes few migrants and yet everyone loves Akira Toriyama.
The reason the West has to care what people think is because of immigration in the first place. It doesn't matter if Haitians hate the US for deporting their coethnics back home; it is precisely because a bunch of immigrants - and their allies - can vote that it's even a problem in the first place.
If it were true that it would haunt nations, America's flirtation with racist and anti-immigrant leaders like Trump would make a bunch of people go home. It's a sort of guilt round robin where the sort of people prone to guilt (left-wingers) coach the people who will guilt them into folding and then hold that up to their fellow citizens as a justification to do what they wanted to do anyway. The important thing is not the refugees, it's the citizens.
* If I hear about Bilal one more time...
Making the noises and then doing globohomo stuff seems worse than making the noises and keeping globohomo out/maintaining some semblance of Christian values.
But YMMV I'm not a Christian so maybe I don't value enough the value it places on the spirit rather than the form.
But, if you were a (Orthodox) Christian seeing your faith fade who would you rather support you? A leader like Putin or someone like Talarico that'll come up with some doctrine about how Genesis 1 means transing kids? Or a Stalin who just outright wants you gone?
Better an emperor driven purely by pragmatism than an outright heretic Buffalo Bill-ing your religion or someone hostile to the concept entirely, surely?
Tanista
1d ago
He's a Hirsi Ali Christian: i.e. Christian because it's the only thing they see that can push back against liberalism (and, in Hirsi Ali's case, Islam and the alliance it's made with the left) and provide an alternate civilizational narrative.
This is obviously very different from communists, who think they already have said narrative.
I don't know if this is an argument for or against government subsidies.
I don't think this single data point is evidence for much of anything.
Integrating women into combat roles was studied in the Marine Corps during Obama's time. It found that integrated units basically did worse across the board (something like 90 out of a 100 tasks). They were slower at completing tasks, navigating obstacles, firing accurately and the women got injured more often.
And these were women who were already Marines and the units had only a few of them to match how low the proportion of female Marines was. And even that small number was a blowout.
Now, they didn't do a study on whether women were more likely to lose their shit in combat, but I think the smaller , more fragile sex has some reason to be more neurotic about competing with men in their evolutionary niche. This is not just my argument, this is even the feminist argument, though they wouldn't put it that way. Don Lemon was excoriated for not understanding that women freeze up when being sexually assaulted by men.
Indeed. American can claim to be a regional hegemon (notice that I'm not complaining how it treats Venezuela) but the world is a much bigger place and not all states are as vulnerable. To apply the same logic to all states - and I suspect this is Trump's mistake too - is a dangerous error.
A little bit of realism is a dangerous thing.
Yes but that's not a group based on an immutable characteristic. That's the red rag.
If you go back in time too, you'd probably be awash in Brazilians, who are a mess to figure out.
Tanista
7d ago
I tend to be a Cofnasian about wokeness (remove the "equality thesis" and it collapses) but stuff like this does make me wonder.
I suppose you can say that saying IQs are low is fine. Saying groups have lower IQ is very much not fine.
I don’t think it’s a big leap to go from “some population groups run faster” to “some population groups do management/science better”.
It's also not a big leap from "men are significantly stronger than women" to "and this is almost certainly paired with related psychological differences" and yet it's resisted valiantly. Even while feminists also say - correctly - that men are the dominant major suppliers of violence.
You don't have to have a coherent position. You just have to have a position that isn't on the side of racists. You can't deny that men are stronger (well, mostly not; the trans stuff has been sidling up to that position and suffering predictable consequences) or some people are better at sprinting. You have to deny that some races are smarter. Just always pick the pro-migration position.
Tanista
7d ago
I think Labour might have done better under a coalition government actually.
They got a large but brittle majority based purely on the Tories collapsing and then had to square what they had to do for the economy both with the promises they made to sweep into power (no broad tax rises which meant trying to squeeze taxes everywhere else which both pissed off specific segments of the population and may have caused employment issues) and with the ideology of the backbenchers (who want to do things like lift the limit the cap on benefits for children during a moment when they need every pound they can get, there was a bit of whining about Mahmood's immigration turn but it seems to have gone through)
If they couldn't get anything done without some other party those people could be the bad guys and take the blame.
I think internal revolt is something to fear. You can't expect a thing to be done that'll destroy the government that does it and bring into power one that will reverse it. By that standard I could have solved the problems of the Roman Empire in 15 minutes: stop paying the soldiers so much. I'd be dead but hey, I cracked the issue!
Putting that aside, you also have to factor in that they took Israeli hostages. So it wasn't a situation you could walk away from. It was between letting those people languish, going and getting them or another wave of danegeld that led to this problem in the first place. Sinwar should have died in an Israeli jail.
Maybe they should have taken a deal for the hostages sooner and wrote off Gaza (assuming the deal was honored and that Hamas, who you note had an explicit goal to cause enough damage to their own to wreck normalization) but then some damage would already have been done by the necessary war to get to that. Whatever price Hamas asked while it was whole and intact would have been intolerable.
If an enemy has already shown that concessions made lead to worse outcomes, it's difficult to justify making future concessions that are even more ruinous. Your theory of the case was tried. The Palestinians outperformed expectations. Leaving them in the same spot opened the risk of future spikes like that, especially since we didn't know how their allies would react or how competent they'd be.
Who has an international monopoly on violence? That would be the US which makes them the judge in this case.
The US doesn't have a monopoly on violence, it has a commanding market share. This should be terrifying.
There is no monopoly on force. There is no Constitution, there is no rulebook, there is no immovable constraint on escalation nor any way to roll back decisions you've made. That means America isn't a judge either. It's just another monkey, just one with the biggest stick. And yes, that stick gives it leeway.
But a monkey with a big stick can still suffer consequences, especially if it shows the other monkeys that it is willing to destroy them for things that do not warrant it.
This isn't the time of the Old Testament. Or the age of the Romans. We live in a world where you can wipe millions out with '40s tech, and can do an even better job of it with biological research.
What, you think you're the only ones who can be ruthless? A lot of these countries have proven themselves as or more ruthless than Americans. In this situation people don't even have to want to be suicidally defiant, you can see how these things can escape containment or get out of hand.
In any case, your theory of the case is simply not shared by most of the world leaders (thankfully). You have to explain why they're all wrong for not escalating to hell when facing serious resistance.
Tanista
7d ago
I can't think of a nation that has reacted that way to this sort of thing.
It's not just psychologically impossible for the populace to absorb, it's just a bad part of the world to be seen as weak. The minute it happened the people who supported Hamas were emboldened. In the West protests started immediately.
Netanyahu and co. just gambled they could contain Hamas easily and lost. Once the attack happened it was just functionally impossible to not react and no reaction would have been good.
Whether or not how Israel waged the war was wise or whether it could do better I don't know. The enemy gets a say too and I think it's telling that the best we can come up with here to avoid the consequences is "turn the other cheek". I don't think that particular Jew is in charge.
Tanista
7d ago
Can I see if we have any agreement on certain factual questions:
- Did Trump seek regime change in Iran?
- b. More of a question: what was the win condition of the regime didn't collapse? Would anyone have considered this deal it? Was that reported by anyone beforehand?
- Did Trump say that Iran's stockpile had to be destroyed and has it now been left out of the deal for a later negotiation?
- Did Trump continually threaten to destroy Iran if it didn't open the strait and then back down?
- Did Trump say they have to give up their missile stockpile and has now walked that back?
Tanista
7d ago
Their leaders are dead.
- Harry G. Summers: You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.
- Colonel Tu: That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.
All aims were not achieved like complete regime change but the reason we failed at that is primarily domestic US politics and an unwillingness to cause a lot of Iranian civilian deaths.
How America chooses to cope is irrelevant. It's especially irrelevant because, for all of the talk that the US would see red bro and just crush if it really wanted to, the supposed wildcard President backed down. You can't even blame it on the effeteness of some Obama-style figure drunk on dreams of liberal internationalism. This is the most vocally ruthless Presidency in a while, that ran around threatening to wipe out their entire civilization and...what happened?
Maybe don't start wars you can't win without massive casualties you're not willing to inflict? Especially don't threaten it if you won't go through.
In any case, I don't see how this isn't a loss. The strait isn't open. The IRGC is still functional enough that the US has to negotiate with it to open it. The US is apparently going to have to pay danegeld and Trump has downplayed disarming them. Iran just now suspended talks again and is working (successfully) to drive a wedge between the US and Israel*
The reason regime change was such a central pillar of the thinking (not some sort of stretch goal) was that it was the only path anyone could see to stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions decisively. That failed.
* Regardless of how one feels about Israel, your enemy being able to do this to you is a sign of weakness.
This has been 90% of international law for decades. The US decides and everyone else has to follow the US decision.
France and Germany did not join the US in Iraq, so the US ability to dictate to its allies is at least somewhat limited. They aren't obligated to join everything the US decides to do.
Yes, the US got away with smashing a sovereign nation with no criminal charges or serious reprisals. But:
- Did America really get away with it? One can think of all sorts of negative outcomes that followed, both internationally and domestically.
- Being able to escape consequences is not the same as achieving your objectives. The point of the game is not actually to show that the US Can Just Do Things, despite what the Elite Human Capital keep telling you. It's to prove that doing them actually achieves your goals.
I'd have thought we'd be clear on this after this whole mess. Yes, the US doesn't have to go with its allies into Iran. Yes, the US can just kill a leader of a formidable nation and Trump will likely retire to golf in peace. What did you achieve though?
It's like watching an asshole watch a 20 minute video on realism and then try to implement it IRL.
On the other hand, it does allow him to go back to one of his campaign messages: "everyone is a freeloader that won't help America when we need them."
They don't have to intrinsically dislike immigrants. They can just dislike mass migration. Or mass migration from certain groups. "Immigrants" flattens things too much. Many nations took Ukrainian refugees with much less noise than would come from taking Somali refugees. I assume there're reasons for this.
I mean, case in point.
Fair. I don't think so either. But it's not that I don't think, if the government was magically replaced by Stephen Millers, it wouldn't work.
How would you rate the East Asian countries like Japan on these criteria?
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