site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The focus on immigration types is itself unnecessary. Let the market decide. The key is that migrants and their children should have no recourse to US citizenship (by naturalization or birthright), ever. Perhaps for the richest we can allow them to buy in for $5m per (immediate) family, paid in cash to the treasury dept. Everyone else can go home to retire or when the job is done. They can pay to school their children in public schools, and can’t bring over family unless they can financially demonstrate they can support them.

All we need is the Kuwaiti/Emirati system. These are countries where 80% of the population are immigrants, and yet the natives are still in charge because naturalization doesn’t exist.

At the moment, the US attracts people who see their country of origin going nowhere and are willing to emigrate to secure a better future for themselves and their kids. Due to an oversupply of such people, the US can -- in principle -- filter for the best and the brightest of them.

What you are offering is instead is an oil rig job -- hard work, hostile environment, with the only motivation being able to spend the shittons of money you made after you come back to civilization.

Now I am sure that you would find takers for that deal, global income disparities being what they are, plenty of people would jump at the chances to pick up dog turds for minimum wages which will allow their extended families to live comfortable lives. I mean, it is not like the Arab oil dynasties have problems finding wage slaves either. Put in the hours, go back home, live a better life.

But the top of the cream will likely look elsewhere. Why would anyone take a professorship in a country which has made it plain that they would kick them out as soon as they retire when they could go to Canada instead? Likewise, there is certainly the trope of immigrants who are working hard so they can fulfill their dream of some day owning a Kwik-E-Mart.

The lower class of US citizens will not much like the outcome of your proposal either. Suddenly they have to compete against people who are completely beholden to their employers for continued residency and may come from cultures in which unions are not a thing, while also willing to work for much lower wages because they do not have to feed a family in the US from them. If you think Facebook's preference for H-1Bs over citizens was bad, wait until Amazon gets to staff all their warehouses with people who have much worse visa conditions than H-1B.

I also have some moral objections to your proposal. Leaving aside the question if indentured servitude a la UAE is really the path the US should follow, I also believe that people should generally be the citizen of the country they have lived in for generations. Your proposal would create a permanent caste of people who are non-citizens. Given the TFR, it seems entirely possible that at some point a significant fraction of the population will be excluded from democratic participation. At some point you in effect have an aristocracy. This feels deeply un-american to me.

If only the United States had the foresight to institute such a system a century and a half ago, before the immigrant problem got out of hand. Then they could have just used my great-grandfather's labor in the mines until he decided to retire (coincidentally right around the time Pittsburgh Seam coal started running low), and then deported him back to Galicia just in time for the German invasion. Another great-grandfather would have been shipped back to Calabria some time in the late 40s or early 50s. I don't want to think what the consequences for your family would have been. I'm not sure what the downside was of their being allowed to stay.

America is a settler country; all of us except the natives were ‘immigrants once’ (even if before independence). But it is fair for a settler country to decide that permanent settlement is finished. That involves no contradiction or hypocrisy. Manifest destiny is over. The only remaining land is either worthless or protected for nature. 330 million is enough.

The only remaining land is either worthless or protected for nature. 330 million is enough.

This seems wildly arbitrary. Why can't Duluth be the size of Chicago, Wilmington the size of Manhattan, Portland (Maine) at least as large as Boston? Not to mention the density of many major American cities such as Boston, DC, St. Louis, etc. is a fraction of what it could be. Immigrants aren't coming to America to buy a plot of land and do subsistence farming anymore, they'd be coming for manufacturing and service jobs.

This seems wildly arbitrary.

And it is the right of a nation to make such arbitrary decisions.

It is, but that means pro-immigration people have just as much right to try to set the figure arbitrarily high.

If we're not trying to base it on cost benefit or some kind of moral function, then each persons arbitrary figure is as valid as the next. Which isn't very helpful from a governence perspective.

America is a settler country; all of us except the natives were ‘immigrants once’ (even if before independence).

Not except for the natives; the ancestors of the modern tribes (the Clovis people) killed and/or drove out an earlier wave of settlement.

Even ignoring the pre-Clovis peoples, native American tribes regularly warred with each other: the successful ones expanded, and the losers fled to more marginal lands, had their women integrated into the replacing tribe, or were killed.

1492 wasn't at some equilibrium state where everyone was where their ancestors had been for thousands of years. Even post-exchange, this process continued: who does Mount Rushmore belong to? The Lakota, who were dominated by the US? Or the Cheyenne, who were dominated by the Lakota? Or whatever group preceded the Cheyenne before somehow being erased from the historical record?

out an earlier wave of settlement.

who were they?

Usually just called the "pre-Clovis culture" (or "cultures"). Not much is known about them.

And if you go back far enough, every human outside Africa is an immigrant from Africa.

I am not an expert on the field but it seems that Out of Africa is becoming more controversial over the alternative that humanity evolved in different continents. There is also the idea of multiple waves of immigration out of Africa. As for the multi-regional model, in addition to evolving to different environments, part of this evolution has been also breeding with different hominid species. We simply keep finding hominids and ancient humans in regions outside of Africa that at minimum challenges the certainty of Out of Africa model.

The findings support a multiregional hypothesis, which argues that before our species left Africa for Europe, there was continuous gene flow between at least two different populations.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-first-humans-out-of-africa-werent-quite-who-we-thought

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-out-of-Africa-theory-debunked

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99257&page=1 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-out-of-africa-theory-out/ https://www.livescience.com/ancient-human-vertebra-found-israel https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/evolution-theory-out-of-africa-dali-skull-china-homo-erectus-sapiens-latest-a8064306.html

I mean, Out of Africa in the narrow sense of "100% of our ancestry comes from a single migration from Africa that completely wiped out all other human populations without interbreeding" has been debunked, but it has been replaced with "~95% of our ancestry comes from a single migration from Africa and the rest from interbreeding with other human populations that migrated from Africa at earlier times" which still fits the simpler statement "we all came from Africa."

As far as I know, the story recostructed from fossils and genetics is like this:

  1. Genus Homo evolves in East or South Africa from earlier bipedal apes (e.g. Australopithecus) between 2.5 and 2 million years ago.
  2. First out-of-Africa migration by Homo ergaster/erectus, which uses knapped stone tools and fire but still has a noticeably smaller brain than ours, about 1.5 million years ago. Populations migrate into tropical Asia ("Peking Man", "Java Man", the "Hobbits" of Flores). All or near all the ancestry of modern humans comes from the populations that stayed in Africa.
  3. Second out-of-Africa migration by Homo heidelbergensis, which makes wooden spears and builds early shelters, 800-500,000 years ago. This wave gets much farther north, and eventually spawns the Neanderthals of Europe and the Near East, and the Denisovans of north-central Asia, but still never leaves greater Afro-Eurasia. The much more primitive ergaster descendants are completely replaced, surviving for longer only on islands.
  4. Our own species, Homo sapiens, appears somewhere in Africa between 300 and 200,000 years ago. After 100,000 years ago or so it starts developing modern tech like spear throwers and stone arrowtips as well as the earliest abstract and figurative art. The ancestors of San, Hadza, and Pygmy peoples split off from other modern human populations. Meanwhile, Neanderthals and Denisovans develop into their late form and exchange genes.
  5. Third out-of-Africa migration by Homo sapiens, with an abortive migration through Egypt into the Near East 100,000 years ago and then a crossing from Ethiopia into Yemen 70,000 years ago. The wave first follows the tropical coast of Asia, absorbing some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA along the way, into Australia. A "ghost species" of which no fossils are known leaves behind some DNA in Subsaharan populations. After 50-40,000 years ago the Eurasian populations start moving northward, crossing further with Neanderthals and developing technology suited for cold environments, and eventually crossing into the Americas.

I suppose in the end the answer seems to be kind of an Hegelian synthesis of multiregionalism and out-of-Africa, but I'd say the latter wins on balance.

This is still ‘out of Africa’ in the 19th century sense, it’s just not in the narrow “all modern humans evolved fully in Africa then left” way that some late 20th century anthropologists suggested.

True, and they all immigrated over the land bridge at some time. The point is that though nationhood is to some extent arbitrary, that doesn’t make it less real. You can close the doors at any time just because you want to.

But if it is simply arbitrary then the people wanting to keep the doors open have just as much of an argument as those who want it closed.

Its both true and not very helpful in the broader sense.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats