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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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A dark possibility is that the HBD dysfunction of the Irish was indeed very much a thing, but events like the famines exerted a strong selective pressure that over time raised Irish performance significantly, to the point that it now equals other NW Europeans.

Not sure why the famine would be more selective than all the wars and rebellions. Don’t think the evidence is good that they were ever stupid. Like the Armenians, they have a weirdly extensive and developed literature compared to their population size (probably around 750,000 at the time of the conquest IIRC). I think it’s more important that they had no indigenous tradition of living in cities (which were Norse and then English), which is where high civilization things tend to occur. After the conquest [edit: Norman, not Tudor], most of the best economic territory was in the hands of the major English lords, who were culturally oriented toward France and England.

There was some historic oral and literary tradition. More recently though much famous ‘Irish’ literature in the revival was not written by ethnic Irish but by the Anglo-Irish. Even Joyce claimed to be of Norman and Scandinavian descent and that his ancestors came over during Cromwell’s settlement, although that’s a topic of some historic debate. If you were asking for evidence of a great historic African literary tradition and I cited a bunch of Boer writers I presume that would be similarly invalid.

One theory (discussed elsewhere in this thread I think) is that the Irish were probably on the level of other peer populations in the dark ages but deteriorated considerably from the 16th to 19th centuries with the potato monoculture, ever smaller plots of land, worse nutrition, overpopulation and so on. Perhaps it begun even earlier in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. It then took emigration, selection of the smartest and improved nutrition to successively drive huge performance improvements over time.

I don’t think it’s as easy to dismiss poor estimates of Irish performance from the Victorian/Edwardian era as some people suggest. It’s entirely possible they were correct but that outsized gains have led to the current equivalence. We know poor nutrition can have a deleterious effect on IQ and the diet of the Irish in 1850 was probably substantially worse than their ancestors’.

The early literature in the Irish language always struck me as precocious by northern European standards, particularly in prose, and the Irish also developed the Ogham script within a few centuries of the Nordic runes, so I think they have a literary tradition to be proud of even discounting the Anglo-Irish contribution.

Uh, what selective pressure do you think the potato famine exerted? As far as I can tell it just killed random poor people, with those wealthy enough to be exempt being mostly non-Irish.

Well, in that case the HBD doom and gloom is overblown. If things get bad, it'll just take a few disasters to knock off the rust and return a given race to fighting trim.

What did you find objectionable about my comment in the immigration bill thread?

As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters.

Why does it matter?

It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends.

Why does every other issue depend on it?

Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time.

Buys the Right more time... for what?

There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago.

What does a "European-style nationalist policy platform" look like, and why should I want one? IIRC, you were pretty bullish on the UK Tories. How's that working out these days?

Is the problem Immigration, or is the problem Blue power? If you had to choose between immigration and no Blue power, or no Blue power but lots of immigration, which would you pick?

Immigration isn't the only thing that matters, Blue power is. Immigration matters because it's a Blue Tribe win condition under the old system, but that win condition has already effectively been executed. Having been executed, its further importance is only going to diminish over time. Controlling the border was a means to an end, which was keeping Blues from engineering unilateral control by importing voters; having failed, the priority transfers to other methods of denying, constraining and deconstructing that control.

What is the goal? The OP in that thread seemed to think that passing favorable laws should be presumed to be useful, and you appeared to agree. I'd guess that you're comparing our current situation without the law to a hypothetical with the law, and the latter seems obviously better to you, because we would have the law, and then it would be enforced. So the choice is between getting things we want, versus not getting things we want. But passing the law grants legitimacy to the existing system, and there is zero reason to believe that actual enforcement would happen. This is the fundamental problem with that thread's OP, which spends a ton of words describing the bill, and then throws this in towards the end:

In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.

There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file...

...There's more than a "kernel" of truth in that idea, and if it's "extremely oversimplified" or "lacking in nuance", I'd be fascinated to hear how. @gattsuru has written a lot of quite excellent posts detailing evidence for the problem, and I've tried to contribute where I could. We had all the laws we needed to prevent mass immigration. They didn't work, because Blues actively subverted them, as they subvert every law, rule or decision intended to serve Red Tribe interests. What is the point of passing additional laws in "cooperation" with Blues when we already know any part of the law that serves our interests will not be enforced, and any part of the law that serves Blue interests will be expanded light-years beyond the scope provided by the text?

Why is this law more valuable than the defiance against Blues coordinated and the legitimacy for Blues denied by refusing it? If we can break Blue control, it doesn't seem to me that immigration actually matters much any more, and passing that law doesn't seem like it helps break Blue control. Again, "more time" for what?

And all this applies to Trump as well. It is questionable whether good governance is even possible under current conditions. Failing that, stripping the system of its legitimacy is the best alternative, to open up more space for state-level leaders like Abbott and De Santis, and possibly to accelerate Blue states like California and New York further down their current ideological trajectories. Trump continues to accomplish this, which is, I think, why his support remains so strong: he coordinates defiance, whether he means to or not, whether he even understands the situation or not. No matter what happens, the system will have significantly less legitimacy next year than it does now; given that the immigration has already mostly happened, that seems like a good thing to me.

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