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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Otherwise, would you agree that the Motte's seeming consensus against even skilled immigration (well, I get dogpiled pretty hard whenever I try posting in support of it at least) is pretty anti-meritocratic?

I'm not sure how one could conclude that there's even a seeming consensus of the sort here. Whether or not you get dogpiled over an opinion doesn't really tell us anything about consensus; merely what types of people tend to dogpile, as well as what types of posts you tend to perceive.

I have the impression that the median poster here would prefer their doctors, engineers, pilots, etc. to be white/have far-reaching ancestry in whatever country (depending on the exact poster) than being the most competent people that can be found.

I'm not sure how one could come to this conclusion, as someone who spends more time on this forum than I ought to. I don't think there's anything such as a "consensus" here on this kind of stuff, but the closest thing to a consensus I could see here is the precise opposite of this, that almost everyone here believes in putting the most competent people that can be found into these positions. They simply believe that, for empirical reasons, that a world in which the most competent people fill these roles is also a world in which a majority of those people will belong to certain races. They may be mistaken, but the goal always seemed to me to maximize competence, and let the racial makeup fall where they may.

They may be mistaken, but the goal always seemed to me to maximize competence, and let the racial makeup fall where they may.

I put a longer reply here. Basically, I don't think this is at all consistent with the policies enacted by the US right---especially the US alt-right that is more in line with this forum.

I mean, maybe. But then you're talking about the US right and the US alt-right, not the "consensus" of this forum. US right and US alt-right are certainly popular in this forum, but to say that there's anything nearing a consensus that such political/ideological movements are Good is, in my view, absurd, just from my time reading the comments here. Furthermore, even if there were, the people here tend to be idiosyncratic enough that their support for broad political/ideological movements such as those tend to have tons of caveats and places of severe disagreements, often in very different areas depending on the person, even when they're ostensibly on the same "team" (this is present on the left as well as on the right here, in my view, where there are plenty of left-leaning users including myself and you, but our views on what the left is doing right and what it's doing wrong tend to be quite different from each other).

If you were to say that there are many people on this forum, especially ones who produce a disproportionate number of comments, that support the mirror image of DEI, then I would agree. If you want to say that the presence of such people who make lots of posts in this vein who don't get significant pushback (a description I disagree with, but I am willing to take for granted for the sake of argument) indicates that there's a consensus, then I couldn't disagree more. Again, I don't perceive there being any consensus on this (the closest thing to a consensus on this forum I can tell is that "wokeness/leftist idpol/SocJus/CRT is, on net, harmful to our society"), but I'd wager that the most common view here - not common enough that I'd call it a consensus, but I'd bet it's a plurality - is that society is better when it prioritizes individual competency when picking people to put into important critical roles, and as such that's what we ought to do. Some (many) people here believe that discriminating on the basis of race is one particularly effective method of accomplishing this (one might say this is the mirror of DEI - one core component of DEI is that society is better when it prioritizes Diversity* when picking people to put into important critical roles, and most of its proponents believe that discriminating on the basis of race is one particularly effective method of accomplishing this).

But, who knows, in a forum like this, determining if there's a consensus, much less what it is is both nearly impossible and highly subjective. It's not like we have some numerical criterion by which we can say, "Aha! So that reveals that the consensus of TheMotte is XYZ!" It's almost entirely based on vibes, at the end of the day. My vibes is that there's no shortage of leftist posters here, and probably even moreso centrist/heterodox posters. When weighted by post count, perhaps they're, put together, less voluminous than the rightists, but the amount clearly seems significant enough to deny any sort of rightist consensus (except, again, that anti-DEI thing).

* Diversity here has an idiosyncratic meaning of something like "more people from populations that we have judged to have been overtly oppressed in the past and thus still suffer from both the legacy of that and the existing structures that reinforce that today," rather than the generally understood meaning of "having a large variety of types" or the like.