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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I mean, there's another pretty huge assault on meritocracy in how hard skilled immigration is---even IMO medalists have a hard time immigrating to the US. Anyone upset about the impacts of DEI on competence should also be upset about this.

Anyone upset about the impacts of DEI on competence should also be upset about this.

Why? Most countries have enough talented people among their citizens to keep the lights on without relying on immigration. The impact of rejecting skilled immigration is nowhere near the same as that of implementing DEI.

There are important things that are much more difficult than just keeping the lights on. For example, there are extremely high skill-ceiling jobs where extreme competence leads to dramatically greater positive impact---the 100x programmer, entrepreneurs, academic research, etc. The top performers are so rare in these fields that no country has enough; every country could benefit by getting more.

If you want to live in a country that just focuses on maintaining its current standard of living without improving, developing new technology, creating anything great at all, then sure. You can just accept all the extreme suffering that happens even among the rich in developed countries.

The impact of rejecting skilled immigration is nowhere near the same as that of implementing DEI

Finally, how are you making this comparison? Here's a great article on the impact of skilled immigration in the US. You can even see here the impact from rejecting just one single person . There's nothing caused by DEI even close to matching this.

Anyone upset about the impacts of DEI on competence should also be upset about this.

I think there's a distinction elided by the word "competence" here.

Skilled immigration being hard reduces (average) individual competence. DIE reduces institutional and societal competence, because those institutions and society are using false models of the world. Being upset at one (either one) does not necessarily imply being upset at the other.

I will also note that it is possible to believe that something is important and also believe that it is outweighed by other important things in certain specific cases. The obvious case with regard to skilled immigration is "skilled immigrants from the PRC are considerably less valuable to Western countries than one might expect from their level of skill, because a large chunk of them are sleeper agents either by brainwashing or by having family in the PRC that can be used for extortion".

It is a common but idiotic refrain uttered by international elites that people are fungible and all desire for fairness must resolve in mass immigration that benefits the aforementioned international elites.

Aliens have a fundamental quality that makes them unable to be directly compared to belongers, and it's that they're aliens.

However qualified aliens are does not invalidate meritocracy in particular, or nationalism in general.

We're not a bunch of individual humans scattered inbetween imaginary lines. We live in societies.

@Felagund @07mk and everyone else arguing with me that anti-meritocratic views are more common on the left than on the right in the US. Here's another very explicitly hereditarian comment. "Aliens have a fundamental quality that makes them unable to be directly compared to belongers, and it's that they're aliens." is pretty damn extreme!

I really want to keep emphasizing how often such points come up when you discuss skilled immigration. Note also the support such views have from vote counts.

What does this have to do with hereditarianism? Are you German or something? Blood is not what sanctifies American nationhood. Let alone all nationhoods. My ancestors have incidentally fought the Germans on this issue and gained citizenship in that manner, so I'm living proof that this assumption is wrong.

Another common idiotic refrain of internationalists is to assimilate any nationalism to racial animus to play up fears of National Socialism against those who would organize against them. You're not trying to do that, are you? You who seems so concerned with vox populi.

Societies have many dimensions. Being an Alien has many dimensions. Some people can integrate more smoothly than others. Some societies are more compatible than others.

All of this is to say, that you're right that theres more to it than meritocracy youre right that individuals aren't fungible. But you're collapsing the dimentionality of the Alien to 1D

I do no such thing. I establish the existence of a boundary. And its importance to nation as a concept.