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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Isn't it definitely worth mentioning that if he were born in the UK, it's not at all a "recent" immigration?

Location of ones birth being a factor on determing if a person is an immigrant or not, is a New World concept, not a universal one.

Even if we're playing the counterfactual game, which is always epistemically suspect in the case of individuals,

This proves way too much. Any crime commited by an immigrant, is a crime which wouldn't have happened had the immigrant been prevented from entering the country. Your general dismissal of "counterfactuals" leads to erasure of immigrant crime.

The situation also pretty much requires asking "how well does assimilation work in the UK"?

Assuming that the receiving state should invest in assimilation, is begging the question that people who require assimilation should be let in anyway.

because otherwise the local UK culture is presumably just as much "to blame" as his parent's upbringing.

If indigenous peoples if the British isles murder and rape children at lower rates than people who are of foreign ethnic extraction, it is ludicrous to blame the British values for the crimes of the latter. because the later will surely on average adhere to them les

Any crime [committed] by an immigrant, is a crime which wouldn't have happened had the immigrant been prevented from entering the country. Your general dismissal of "counterfactuals" leads to erasure of immigrant crime.

That is only relevant if one already assumes the ethnonationalist world-view; namely the propositions that countries exist for a select group defined by blood, that moral concern is rightfully extended only to that group, and that anyone else being allowed to exist in their territory is a supererogatory courtesy.

As someone with a more pan-humanist world-view, I don't see 'immigrant crime' as a category that carves reality at its joints; and excluding immigrants does not prevent the crimes a few of them would have committed, but merely moves them to another place; lowering the crime rate in England, while increasing it in Rwanda by the same amount, for no change in the total, at the cost of the stifling of opportunity (and infliction of indignity attendant on any form of discrimination) for countless innocent Rwandans, does not, in my view, seem advisable if one considers an umpteenth-generation Englishman and a Rwandan immigrant (or his son) to be equal in terms of moral worth.

lowering the crime rate in England, while increasing it in Rwanda by the same amount, for no change in the total,

This is only true if there's no change in birth rates downstream of immigration relieving/causing crowding. At the opposite extreme where birth rates/death rates totally compensate for the population transfer, then the cashed-out result is that instead of a Rwandan in England and a Rwandan in Rwanda you have an Englishman in England and a Rwandan in Rwanda, and if Rwandans in England commit more crime than Englishmen in England then there's less total crime.

Now, of course, there's not perfect compensation, particularly on the European end (on the African end there potentially is enough food scarcity to compensate). But I don't think it's zero on the European end either; housing prices would be lower with less immigrants, and housing affordability seems to be related to white birth rates.

Location of birth mattering or not is, yes, a unique cultural concept that differs across time and place. The simple fact however is that the parents did not give birth, move back to Rwanda, raise their child there, and then bring him back to the UK right before the murders. Much of the conversation in this thread makes it sound like this is the case. No, AFAIK, he spent all 17 years of his life in the UK. That's 100% of his life, and also, a pretty substantial chunk of time. So if we're playing the blame game, we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree. That's why I bring up assimilation. You can't just ignore it. Insofar as it makes sense, there's a reason that sometimes in for example a legal examination of a car accident, we sometimes go so far as to talk about "percent of blame" due to different parties. That's the broad idea I'm getting at here. He, himself, is not an immigrant in most meaningful senses of the word. He must be understood as a second-generation immigrant, a term which exists as its own, different "thing".

Please note I was fairly careful in my wording, and for good reason. I talk about counterfactuals as applied to individuals, because there's a big risk of bias interacting with numerical/scientific issues in latching on to the wrong thing. We can still have a conversation about counterfactuals, but they need to be grounded in larger, more visible, and more real effects, perhaps using statistics. To say nothing of the fact that making conclusions about large populations from the actions of one or a few child murderers is already a bit suspect. Again, we can have this conversation. Your last paragraph even starts one! But it requires nuance. And it requires at least some degree of rigor which I'm not seeing. A point you make quite clearly when you dismiss counterfactuals so easily without an understanding of why they are problematic in any sort of evidentiary or logically consistent sense.

we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree

There's nothing unique to the UK about Subsaharan Africans committing massive amounts of crime. It's true in the USA, it's true in Sweden, it's true in Brazil, it's true in France, and of course it's true in Africa and the Caribbean.

The rioters know this. They also know they are being ethnically replaced. Trying to muddy the waters by saying things like 'Axel was born in Cardiff' (as if he might be a Welshman called David Llywelyn) is asking them to ignore their own lying eyes, and all the crime statistics.

Do you think there is any meaningful difference between first and second generation immigrants from these countries, and do you think the median Briton would agree?

See ArjinFerman's answer basically. There can be a difference between second and first generation immigrants, and a difference between second generation immigrants and natives.

The fact that SSAs commit boatloads of crime wherever they are in the world suggests that the causes of this are genetic, rather than cultural. That is to say, whatever British cultural norms 2nd gens adopt, they clearly aren't enough to reduce their crime rates to the native average. British culture also seems incapable of causing Chinese people to drink as much and commit as much crime as the natives. The British-born Chinese stubbornly remain model citizens no matter how much integration they experience.

Of course, even that assumes that it is only possible for 2nd gens to adopt the culture of their home country. The existence of UK-born jihadis (adopting wahabi islamist ideology) or drill music (adopting African American hip hop culture) demonstrate otherwise.

As for the second part of your question, I think the answer the median Briton would give would depend on how you define 'meaningful difference'.

The reason I asked is because I feel that if the median Briton does agree, it makes it more important to properly distinguish between the two rather than lump all immigrants in a group. That means if the phrase "second-generation immigrant" is available, "recent immigrant" makes no sense to use, no matter if it's born from linguistic laziness or excessively biased language. At least here, because I know my limits and I don't actually know that much about the UK's overall relationship between culture/immigration/politics/etc, I'm definitely not trying to do any kind of persuasion in "the other direction" but rather just insist on precision of language where it makes sense. Ignoring the use of a relevant word and idea when most people would consider it important context only hurts the discussion. Frankly I don't really know how well or poorly integration goes in Britain, but it's worth noting that genetics still isn't the only plausible explanation. For example, it's possible that the British culture just sucks in the first place, or that it doesn't transmit well, or something like that. Again however if you put a gun to my head I don't know if I could quite express what British culture is, really.

I will concede that, on a meta level, I am more concerned with "precision of language" than the median person, of course :). I think it still makes sense here to insist on it. As an interesting aside, I think The Giver had it completely backwards -- rather than linguistic precision being a tool to hurt and restrict and direct thought, I think it actually helps communication when people say more precisely what they think and pay attention to the connotations words carry as well as being careful to select the word with the closest matching denotation.

The fact that SSAs commit boatloads of crime wherever they are in the world suggests that the causes of this are genetic, rather than cultural.

Just to be clear, that was not my angle. I was going more with: pro immigration people assume integration happens automatically, and that by the time you reach 2nd generation immigrants, they absorbed all the same cultural norms, to the same extent as the native population. I disagree with that assumption.

Sure, but there's also a meaningful difference between second generation immigrants, and the median Briton (with which, I think, the median Briton would agree).

So if we're playing the blame game, we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree. That's why I bring up assimilation. You can't just ignore it.

This is not really an argument I think the pro-immigration side wants to be making: if even a second-generation immigrant raised-in-Britain can't assimilate (an uncharitable HBD-pilled poster might phrase it as "being unable to overcome his genes") then it's an indicator that there might be a deeper issue with the UK's immigration policies. First Google result suggests 10k-15k Rwandans in the UK (https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/mapping-the-rwandan-diaspora-in-the-uk.pdf), and while I don't know the rate of stabbing sprees among native white Britons, my suspicion is that this incident alone places Rwandans well above the base rate. Giving the surprisingly helpful "List of mass stabbings in the United Kingdom" Wikipedia article a quick look (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_stabbings_in_the_United_Kingdom), the perpetrators for the 2020s are:

n.b.: If the news article didn't mention nationality or immigration status, I assumed they were British. Now, I'm no noticer, and the Wikipedia article that I cribbed these cases from does state that it is an "incomplete list", so I'm not going to generalize. Nonetheless, if you're going to assert that we have to "ask about UK culture" then it is perhaps worth considering the demographics of these perpetrators and how reflective they are of "UK culture".

Thanks for bringing the receipts!

This proves way too much. Any crime commited by an immigrant, is a crime which wouldn't have happened had the immigrant been prevented from entering the country. Your general dismissal of "counterfactuals" leads to erasure of immigrant crime.

Here's one for proving too much: 99% of all crime is committed by descendants of Genghis Khan. Any crime commited by a descendant of Genghis Khan, is a crime which wouldn't have happened had Temujin been strangled before he was old enough to ride a horse. Your general acceptance of "counterfactuals" leads to a superexponential mess of hypothetical actions which would have prevented any arbitrary incident via the butterfly effect.

I understand your point but this is almost certainly not true- blacks(least likely to be descended from genghis) commit orders of magnitude more crime than orientals(most likely).

I thought only ~.5% of the world was estimated to be descendants of Genghis? Which is still a massive amount, but nowhere close to high enough for your argument.

I saw some content recently that contests the idea that the common Y-chromosome haplotype previously assumed to come from Ghengis Khan actually does. Apparently new reasearch can trace it back further than him and his direct descendants share a different haplotype.

Not that this is relevant to your point. Presumably, there's still some historical figure that you could slot into the same argument. Just a fun fact I picked up recently.

It almost doesn't matter. Anyone from that long ago who got around across Eurasia is most likely a direct ancestor of the bulk of the human population.

I don't think Genghis Khan is quite long enough ago; he was 12th century. If he'd been 500 years earlier I'd maybe believe it, but 12th century is AFAIK not long enough to get most of Eurasia (the base of the exponential drops below 2 at large generation numbers because descendants don't always marry non-descendants).