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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28399 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Historic flooding in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Whole towns washed away. People retreating to their attics as water levels rise. People losing everything.

Tragic. Horrific. But this is the Culture War thread so I am going to ask the insensitive question, what does this mean for the election in <40 days?

My first thought is that there is a certain irony that these states are among those that just limited the forms of ID allowed at a voting booth. Someone who has lost their house is less likely to have all their documentation, and getting new copies will take longer than the time before the election.

Rural areas that were wiped out will have a harder time finding their polling location under the mud and timber. Mail-in voting will be difficult without a mailbox.

People are going to watch the Biden-Harris's administration to see how they respond.

Do these factors make it more likely for these swing states to turn Blue or Red? Buncombe County, one of the hardest hit, went 60% for Biden in 2020.

Awful stuff, the devastation is insane. And as others have said, there hasn't been any major flooding in these areas since 1791, apparently.

I am normally all for government incompetence and infrastructure failures being pointed out, but honestly this just seems like an act of God. I don't blame anyone in Asheville or the surrounding areas for not being prepared.

But I do blame the federal government for not doing more - where are the jets and helicopters going out there? Where is the televised response and shipping in of starlink and other supplies? I know there's been a FEMA bill signed to give funding but c'mon, this should be an easy publicity win for the left. I have 0 clue why they aren't making more of a big deal out of this.

If anyone does have videos or responses from the White House pls link, because I'd love to see it.

where are the jets and helicopters going out there? Where is the televised response and shipping in of starlink and other supplies?

I feel like this would be the perfect place for that Pawn Star's meme, where flooded Appalachians are begging for aid, and the Federal Government just goes "Best I can do is 100,000, 67 IQ third worlders"

Having just finished volume three of Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire, I'm reminded of how towards the end the Roman Empire was so depopulated by mismanagement and oppressive taxes (there was a specific anecdote about I think Diocletian temporarily suspending the taxes on having children), as well as civil wars, famine and pestilence that they just started letting Goths and whoever else wanted to cross their borders to raise the GDP of the regions. That these newcomers murdered all the locals and pillaged their cities barely seemed to matter. Did they pay their taxes? Uh.... not really... in fact they demanded thousands of pounds of gold as tribute. But a bunch of Roman bureaucrats got to embezzle money and take bribes so it all worked out in the end.

The lack of response looks extremely bad when we consider how much aid has been poured into Ukraine and Palestine, AND 10's of thousands of refugees have been pulled out of other country's (such as Haiti's) disaster areas and housed on U.S. Soil.

They should have C-130's airdropping supplies already. As it stands, Kamala hasn't even sent a tweet.

There should already be promises to put a couple billion or so dollars into rebuilding (i.e. what they claim they'll do for Ukraine once the war ends).

If the U.S. government can't even muster up the same kind of resolve and resources to rescue U.S. Citizens on U.S. soil due to a natural disaster, then unironically, they do not deserve to rule, full stop.

This is why its such a horrible idea to remove all the slack from the system to spend on relatively frivolities. When the need arises to spend your reserves due to an actual unexpected disaster, you don't have the change to spare.

I sure hope it doesn't take as long to deliver aid to North Carolina as Ukraine. Hopefully fewer fights over it in Congress as well. Maybe there should have been more funding for FEMA in the continuing resolution?

Does FEMA need additional funding? Use of the fund was approved yesterday and as far as I understood it the damage, while severe and tragic, hit mostly relatively low density areas. This isn't a hurricane Katrina situation, right?

Does FEMA need additional funding?

Partly I am taking a shot at the claim that comes up every time there's some kind of disaster in the US (see also: Hawaii, East Palestine, wildfires, etc...) that foreign aid has somehow compromised our disaster response capabilities - often by the same people who oppose funding disaster preparedness - when in fact the US has capabilities for disaster relief so we don't have to respond in an ad hoc manner like we do with foreign events. When the question comes up: why aren't we doing X grand gesture of relief, the answer is usually that we have something more practical but less grandiose that we're already doing.

But also, apparently yes..

Starlinks are a good point. In a sane world FEMA has thousands of them with batteries ready to deploy. I wonder if they do though, given the apparent hatred of Musk in the federal government.

God that’s so pathetic.

Someone who has lost their house is less likely to have all their documentation, and getting new copies will take longer than the time before the election.

Less likely, on the margins, sure. But realistically, what things would you grab on your way out the door if there was a catastrophic weather event? Personally, I'd be grabbing my phone, which has my driver's license in the case. Even in the event that my home was wiped out by a catastrophic flood, I would still almost certainly be able to provide the required identification to vote. If anything, this makes me even less sympathetic to the idea that it's actually totally normal and reasonable for legitimate voters to lack identification.

Okay I’ll respond here and say: my drivers license or any of my “documents” would be among the last things I would think to grab. I’d want:

  1. Kids/wife/debit card

  2. Hardware authenticators (irreplaceable)

  3. Laptop

  4. Gun

  5. “Survival” stuff like a fishing rod and a water filter and some lighters.

I realize this makes me very stupid, and this event has made me reevaluate my thoughts. For instance if I lost ALL of my “documents”, could I reconstruct them? My intuition says: yes, easily. Just “steal” my own identity. I have my DL# and SSN memorized. I know my full name, DOB, all of my addresses, employment history, etc.

What would it actually take, I wonder?

My debit card is in my wallet besides my license— is your’s in a separate container?

Yes it’s in the glovebox in my car. Home Depot is the only place I go that doesn’t take Apple Pay, so I keep it in there in case I go to Home Depot.

I guess if it was explicitly a driving license I would keep that in there as well, but it seems there are lots of other, non driving related things I need it for (flying, for instance) so it lives in the house.

What are hardware authenticators?

It’s a hardware 2 factor authentication device.

So like when you log in to a service, instead of texting me, I have to insert/read something from a little piece of hardware.

Oh like a Digipass, gotcha.

I'd consider my credit+debit+cash to be urgent and my driver's license to be replaceable ... but in effect that means I'd definitely have ID, since it's all in the same wallet.

I feel like the "I don't know anybody voting for Nixon" lady, but I don't think I know any adult who doesn't carry ID habitually. I guess my wife sometimes leaves her ID and cards at home when I'm driving, but even then it's less often than not.

Things are probably different in cities with good mass transit, but does that describe any of the ones flooding?

We now have recognised digital drivers' licenses on your phone, but to be honest I wasn't carrying one before then anyway. A wallet is just one more thing to carry, everything is on the phone. An ID isn't necessary to fly domestically here either, so it's easily left at home as well. I'd currently need to use cash maybe once every two years.

In my state of Washington in the last legislative session we allocated $150,000 to study the idea of digital driver’s licenses. The study is due at the end of this year. Maybe in the upcoming session we can get a bill passed to implement them and then in another year, minimum, they can roll out.

We now have recognised digital drivers' licenses on your phone

And you’d be a fool to use it. Are you planning on handing your unlocked phone to a cop?

If it wasn't clear, I don't live in a country with as adversarial a relationship with the cops as the US, but I have a shortcut to pin the app on open, kiosk mode. I've never had to use it in the 2 ish years it's been available but I understand the ID verification flow doesn't require a phone to be handed over, just a QR code displayed and scanned.

You have a lot of trust in the kiosk mode. I don’t know where you are, but I see the relevant difference as the fact that US cops and courts cannot compel you to unlock your phone, whereas in most of the rest of the world they can.

I haven’t brought my drivers license with me for any reason other than flying in…years.

My car unlocks with my phone, which also has apply pay. I don’t carry a wallet with me, and I don’t carry house keys with me either. My house uses electronic locks, and I’m very competent with a lock pick (and can improvise one very quickly) in the event that that fails.

Usually when we fly finding IDs is a task on our to do list.

On the one hand I've always heard you have 24 hours to produce your license (no idea if that's true). On the other hand....what do you do if your phone gets lost, stolen, or broken?

My phone crashed in a major city in another state on me once and that was bad enough with my wallet and keys and someone with me.

So hypothetically, what happens if you get stopped by Police and they ask to see your license? Or is that not a thing that they ask for where you live?

I’ve never been stopped by the police. But if I was I’d give them my DL# and they would presumably just look it up on their computer in their car.

Depending on local policy (and the mood of the cop) you might get forced to show up in court over that. At least I know that's theoretically supposed to happen where I live (but probably rarely gets applied unless you're violating some other law simultaneously since it's a huge waste of time both for you and for the government).

I guess I just don’t care. If they make me show up to court because I didn’t have the little plastic thing, and instead just had them look it up, that’s funny to me.

Go on the clown ride at the clown show to get scolded by clowns for not having my clown department issued clown card with me. Nothing could be funnier to me.

I could be wrong, but I feel like an officer would probably look you up with the number, but then chide you with a "you need to carry your license when you drive" before he sent you on your way.

@Stellula Having had this experience I was sent on my way with a summons to appear and produce the license in court.

Upon appearing with my license the case was dismissed but I was admonished for not having my license while driving.

Yeah that’s exactly what I assume would happen.

To weigh in somewhat in between you and /u/roystgnr, I have my license with me 100% of the time when I leave the house, but also have repeatedly had a "why in the world do you not have your license?" conversation where my wife has been denied alcohol for lack of ID. So, I am well aware that this is way above lizard man constant levels, but am also absolutely baffled at what the upside is to not just having your ID in your wallet.

A surprising amount of women's clothing does not come with pockets of sufficient size to store anything like a wallet, so they need to pack necessities manually before every trip based on need and available storage. This could be anything ranging from a handbag to the minimally-sized pocket of a tight-fitting piece of pants that might at most fit a few loose cards, which encourages keeping the ID card as a loose item to be tracked and brought explicitly.

Realistically, I wouldn't expect even something as dire as the current North Carolina situation to happen in literally an hour. If you live in a hurricane state, you should have some sort of reasonable plan laid out and be ready to execute in the event that something happens. This is probably good advice in general but becomes more important if you're somewhere that has a non-trivial probability of your house just being destroyed. If I lived in such a state, my go bag would include a few documents - it's not like these chew up much space or weight. Currently, I just always keep my passport in the backpack that I travel with, so that would be an automatic one without needing to think about it any further than chucking a few other things in and bugging out. Otherwise, top priorities would vary based on what the situation is. Things that I would pretty much always bring:

  • Handgun and magazines
  • Passport
  • Box of Clif bars and Maurten gels (seriously, it's a shitload of calories without much weight)
  • Phone (my case has my driver's license, debit card, and credit card)
  • Wool running gear - all-purpose across weather and keeps me warm even if wet
  • Handwarmers

Imperfect, but doesn't weigh much, is enough calories to survive for a few days even with heavy movement, includes self-defense, some warmth, and includes money and ID restoration.

Most of these people do not live in places where hurricanes regularly cause damage, and many people were not expecting flooding until it was window-high.

https://x.com/smokiesvol/status/1840077470931832933

https://x.com/Rex_Williams/status/1840467637467574395

Holy shit, those videos almost look like the effects of landslides rather than a hurricane.

Not thinking to grab your social security card and birth certificate I fully understand, but how would you possibly leave behind your driver’s license? Do you not keep it in your wallet, phone case, car, or some other similar place? I honestly couldn’t tell you the last time I left home without my driver’s license, since it never leaves my wallet.

Can I piggyback and have a non culture war sub thread?

I'm interested in learning and pragmatics. I've looked at predictive flood maps before, but it's hard to have any sense of 'how good' they are. I'd also like to know if they are pretty off in some ways, are there any heuristics shy of literally replicating all of the work of coding up a topographic model, a precipitation model, etc., and just turning the dial up, that I could use to more easily get a sense of where is still pretty safe and where might be deceptively dangerous.

One thing that would be helpful is that if anyone knows where I can find recent observational data to compare to the old predictive maps, so preferably maps of the current major flooding with geographic detail that is somewhat close to federal predictive flood maps. Any other reasonable heuristics would be appreciated, though I am open to the answer being that there just aren't any good heuristics that can be generalized beyond detailed knowledge/modeling of a particular geographic area.

You should summon Beej67 for real answers. Just some thoughts from a nobody: common sense, knowing your risk tolerance, and a satellite image can get you pretty far. Don’t be within 20 vertical feet of anywhere a meandering river has ever been. Avoid being at the end of a draw, and in a non-meandering river valley, look for areas where the river has been before, then double or triple the vertical distance. Flow data usually goes back quite a while, but visually, you should be able to ask yourself, "How did that rock end up like that?" You should have to work to get to water, if it's easy to get to you're at flood risk. There's also an element of you don't have to outrun the bear just another person. If there's a path for water to go flood some massive other area get hire then that.

Maybe I get to cheat in my area because I live in an area in the path of ARkStorm so worst case is pretty observable.

I’ve found maps useful for identifying hidden flood dangers, like streams that have been fully encased for a significant distance. The flood maps will show the risk. The heuristic I use is: "If this disaster did occur, would its consequences be so severe that I’d be affected indirectly no matter what?" Maximizing mitigation of the Yellowstone caldera erupting probably isn’t worth much of your time, since the economic effects would be catastrophic, and you'd likely need to become a prepper if you truly want to mitigate that.

are there any heuristics

Look where past floods / natural disasters (blizzards, forrest fires, earthquakes) were?

There are services like this:

https://www.augurisk.com/risk/state/north-carolina/buncombe-county/37021

Good bet would be that insurances have the best models and risk assessments.

Red voters in red states will not switch blue after a natural disaster. Why would they? At best the Biden administration handles this competently, at worst it's a disaster. Is Kamala Harris going to lead a public relief tour? Trump would.

Going further, does the administration even care about red voters in red areas? They haven't stopped spending money on charter flights for resettling Haitians. That's their priority. They will authorize whatever emergency funds sound good on a campaign ad.

If anything voter turnout will increase. When normal life is suspended public life becomes that much more important. Documentation will not be a problem: emergency atmosphere and community mindset will make people solve problems.

Red voters in red states will not switch blue after a natural disaster. Why would they?

The conspiracy theory that's relevant here isn't that a failed disaster response will turn those Trump voters into Harris voters - it'll turn them into corpses or people so busy with disaster recovery efforts that they're unable to vote.

I tentatively expect this to shift things towards Trump.

There's an old article on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/

about how right wing politics are optimized towards surviving, ie in an apocalypse, and left wing politics are optimized for thriving when there are plenty of resources. When things are tough you make tough decisions and sacrifices in order to survive, and make stable family units that can replace the people who inevitably die. Which right wing politics are optimized for. When things are great and there's plenty to go around then you can do whatever you want and be inefficient but free and happy, and anyone trying to restrict you is doing it for selfish reasons, so you should ignore them, which left wing politics are optimized for.

Maslow's Hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to tip it sideways, so the lower baser needs are on the right while the higher needs are on the left, as those are their strengths.

When things are tough, people want a tough leader who does what needs to be done, who will ensure their basic necessities, security, and establish confidence and project strength. Regardless of whether Trump is actually more effective at this than Harris, he certainly appears that way superficially. I expect more swing votes to shift towards Trump compared to the counterfactual scenario where these floods did not happen, though I have no idea how strong of an effect this will be, so not sure if it will matter or even be statistically significant.

Looking back, Katrina was politically and electorally brutal for Republicans, while Sandy clinched re-election for Obama. This despite neither storm primarily impacting swing states. It's all in the optics of the president being in control or out of control.

The takes post hurricane are always hilariously stupid, the kind of weird bourgeois socialism that Trump would love. Insuring beach houses that get flooded every couple years to preserve homeowner value after the private insurance market refuses to play there. Hubristic rebuilding of stuff that'll last another few years. This is right in Trump's wheelhouse, so maybe he'll benefit more than average.

One of the real material advantages to having the media in your back-pocket.

While the bulk of the failure being at the state and municipal level (Mayor Nagin would ultimately be sentenced to 10 years in prison for embezzling hurricane relief funds) the media sold it as a lack of federal oversight.

OOT, Has it really been 20 years?

It really has. In summer 2005, DC’s Batman Begins and Marvel’s Fantastic Four were released.

It's all in the optics of the president being in control or out of control.

Which, in this case, has the bizarre twist of everyone knowing that the President isn't in control of much of anything, but the VP popping in and out of acting like she's in charge depending on whether it would be electorally helpful or not.

Insuring beach houses that get flooded every couple years to preserve homeowner value after the private insurance market refuses to play there.

This continues to infuriate me. Even if someone thinks it's a public problem, I have no idea why it would be a federal problem. Florida has hurricanes. This is a known aspect of Florida. Florida has a GDP comparable to Spain's, they can price in their local natural disasters without coming to the Midwest demanding handouts. Floridians, in my experience, are often smug about what they view as excellent weather and the lack of income taxes, but also demand that the rest of the country subsidize them because they have dangerous weather.

A strange thought: should Gulf Coast states become RV states? Hurricane developing? Everyone drives North. Coast is clear? Everyone drives back.

I'm curious what the alternative is to building homes and watching them get wrecked.

Building codes (including Florida's) do contain guidance for designing houses that are resistant to hurricane-force winds. The Wood Frame Construction Manual, incorporated by reference into the code sections linked above, permits prescriptive design for wind speeds all the way up to 195 mi/h.

I'm curious what the alternative is to building homes and watching them get wrecked.

Concrete. We have the technology to build homes which would take a Category 5 to wreck (and Category 5s are very rare even in Florida). RVs would be a very bad tradeoff. Besides the problem of living in an RV all the time, they're going to get wrecked in lesser storms which most current Florida homes easily survive. Plus, you'd never be able to evacuate in time; the roads would be jammed with RVs which would then get wrecked.

Another alternative would be "don't live there at all".

If the cost of rebuilding weren't subsidized, the market would (slowly) come to an equilibrium where either the places would be left without permanent structures or a good tradeoff between "build strong" and "build cheap but accept rebuilding" would be met.

This looks like trailer parks and commie blocks for the poor, and some combination of locally(possibly artificially) high elevation+reinforced construction+artificial barriers for the rich.

I don't really know how it would shake out. I expect there'd be an excluded middle, houses that were almost good enough to last out a major hurricane, if that's what you're getting at. It's possible the rich would also have some "disposable" construction, though only as second homes.

I posted a while back about Canada, its housing crisis, and the political implications, but I want to talk a bit more about the biggest social/political trend in Canada recently: temporary residents.

In 2024Q2 Canada had 3 million temporary residents, amounting to 7% of our national population. Over half of this total arrived since 2020. I say it all the time, but it is hard to appreciate the speed and scale of this change. Canada was 73% white in 2016, 69% in 2021, and is about 61% now. The share of Canada's resident population from South Asia is only a few percentage points lower than the black share in the U.S. It was only 4% in 2006. Temporary resident inflows plus our normal immigration stream which is among the highest on earth had led to population growth of over 3% per year since the pandemic.

This has put huge strain on our housing market of course which is now among the least affordable on earth. However, one underappreciated implication of this migration is the impact on labour markets. The arrivals are disproportionately low skill and compete with young Canadians. Over the past year as economic growth has slowed significantly, unemployment has begun to rise (now 6.6%) but for 15-24 year olds its nearly 20%.

Housing unaffordability remains near all time highs. We now have 2023 crime statistics showing another increase and erasing all progress since the late 1990s. Canada's total fertility rate data for 2023 came out last week and shows a big drop to 1.26 -- the lowest ever recorded and well below peer countries.

Young Canadians are now 58th most happy in the world. Old Canadians are 8th.

The country continues to circle the drain.

North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.

Canada is facing the worst of it because of the immigration tsunami and a shoddy economy. But, that's like blaming the rain for leaks, when you've got a gaping hole in your roof. Any place in the world would be affected just as adversely, if housing policy was this hostile. Sydney & Honolulu are 2 such examples. It's tempting to think you can trudge along like coastal US cities. But, coastal USA gets around it through sheer brute force. The economies of coastal USA can sustain any level of dysfunction. Be it California's $100b HSR or NYC renting out the whole city's hotels as refugee shelters. Other places aren't so fortunate.

Canada needs to build a shit ton of housing ASAP. The country has practically infinite lumber and just imported a ton of low skill labor. Put up some 4+1s and this will be solved in under a year.

There is no mincing words. Canada's shambolic housing policy is a wealth transfer program from the young to the old. Canada's economy is not doing great, and you'd expect it to affect everyone's QOL equally. Through this (almost direct) wealth transfer, the liberal govt. has decided to let the young bear all the misery, while the geriatrics have the world's greatest retirement.

P.S: I'm Indian and Canada's current immigration policy is a joke even within India. To quote Trump, "They’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us". India's best don't aspire to go to Canada. They go to the US, Urban India or Western Europe. The OP talks about housing costs and Canada's wider problems with productivity. I'll stick to that. Can always talk about immigration later.

Houston has no zoning. In practice, it has some rules. But the lack of formal zoning limits how stringent it can be- and it comes at a cost. Unlike other cities, where there's a 'ghetto', separated from 'a decent neighborhood' by industrial zones or housing for salt of the earth types, and functionally all the crime is in the former, Houston makes up for its relatively cheap housing with evenly spread crime throughout the entire city, rather than concentrating it all in one district.

There's tradeoffs everywhere. Zoning doesn't exist primarily to screw young people- concentrating low-income housing in one spot has benefits.

Unlike other cities, where there's a 'ghetto', separated from 'a decent neighborhood' by industrial zones or housing for salt of the earth types, and functionally all the crime is in the former,

There's plenty of cities where the ghetto is separated from decent neighborhoods by perhaps one city block or even less. Crucially, you can't ensure that an area becomes a ghetto by building an apartment there, and you can't guarantee an area is high income by zoning it for SFH. There's plenty of single family crack houses in Detroit on sale for about tree fiddy.

North American housing crises are manufactured.

Where (in the industrialised world) are they not?

Houston, Texas has as close to a completely free market on housing as anywhere in the industrialized world- it's still relatively affordable rather than absolutely so.

Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.

Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.

Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.

But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.

Hong Kong’s housing crisis is also partially manufactured because the construction of new subway / MTR stations is extremely slow and most people want to live within close walking distance of one in a city that gets extremely hot and humid and which has typhoons on a regular basis. There’s actually a lot of empty land in Hong Kong that’s just mountainous (which they’re very familiar with building on).

North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means for expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.

YIMBY may be associated with the Left and all its social dysfunctions and annoyance these days, but the economic consensus on this one preceded the Left's adoption of YIMBY. Pretty much the only dissent you see, academically, is from the further Left, who ultimately wants only publicly owned housing and is offended by the sheer existence of market rate housing and, even then, their work sucks.

A century and a half ago, NYC had more than a million utterly impoverished immigrants dumped on it when the city and the immigrants were vastly poorer than they are today. This was no problem, from a housing perspective: They threw up a bunch of apartments and tenements and housing stayed under 15% of even the very low income of those immigrants.

A century and a half ago there wasn't welfare, was precious little in the way of building codes, and forget about occupancy codes -- the immigrants were crammed into those tenements.

Yep. It can be done, even when we were so much poorer 150 years ago. We could make something safer today, no doubt, for the vastly smaller numbers of people via our overall population and keep it affordable but we have, in addition to much greater wealth, much greater numbers of 'building codes'.

In practice, it tends to be republicans who 'just build shit', though. They choose to screw over trees rather than existing homeowners in most cases, but build housing they do.

Some historically conservative states (mostly in the South) are pretty good about Just Building. Montana is probably the best example of a state which has recently reformed its laws to make it easier to Just Build, and they're pretty much a former red-tinged swing state.

So yeah, not wrong.

Here is the happiness list (younger age 30):

https://worldhappiness.report/assets/images/2024/ch02/Figure_2.2_1.webp

1 Lithuania (7.7)
2 Israel
3 Serbia
4 Iceland
5 Denmark (7.3)
And
62 United States (6.39)

Unhappiest youth are predominantly in African countries beside Lebanon on second last place and Afghanistan (1,82) on last place.

Why do people put any stock in happiness statistics? To me it looks like what it would be if we measured national temperature by feeling before the invention of the thermometer. Is Il Cairo very cold, cold, hot or very hot? In fact, it's even worse, because you have at least the possibility of moving somewhere else and experiencing another climate while you don't have the option of moving into somebody's else's head.

No idea. It's interesting how this kind of metric (self-reported on presumably a Likert scale of a subset of a population, probably only surveyed once) is typically ridiculed on the Motte, but here it seems to be just accepted.

Israel is second place in world youth happiness?! Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?

"Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle. If you do not fight, life will never be won."

Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?

Israel is winning a war (insofar as shooting fish in a barrel and tampering with Taiwanese pager shipments constitutes a war); what surprise is it that hot-blooded youngsters rejoice in seeing their enemies driven before them, and hearing the lamentations of their women?

Happiness in general doesn't seem to work the way modern people think it does. From my view, among the best predictors are is a) there are real, serious problems + b) we feel confident to handle them well.

Yes, if there is no challenge one can master it often is just a hedonistic treadmill.

There were a few posts last month on Reddit about American Beauty, the 25 year old Oscar movie with Kevin Spacey, and how weird not only the movie but the past time now feels. Together with Office Space and Fight Club artists struggled to find something to rebel against. Cold War was won, war against terror didn’t start yet, economy was great, racism solved, the environment ostensibly protected, peak oil unknown, feminism a joke, and gayness widely accepted by enlightened centrism. So the only way was to attack the mundane boringness of a secure middle class existence.

This is Lester Burnham‘s House in which he lived in 1999 with a wife and daughter and got deeply unhappy:

https://filmoblivion.com/2019/01/15/american-beauty-1999/

Sept 2024 the U.S. housing deficit has increased according to Zillow to 4.5 million.

I mean I’m probably claiming too much, but it looks to me like ethnic homogeneity is a better predictor than income for happiness.

Lebanon and Afghanistan are pretty homogenous as well.

  • -12

This is extremely inaccurate. Lebanon is famously split between feuding Sunni, Shia, and Maronite christian groups to the degree that their constitution sets ethnic quotas for power-sharing. Afghan is also split between many warring tribal-ethnic groups as well, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.

I admit I put my foot in it re: Afghanistan but I don't think Lebanon is a slam dunk. We're talking about ethnic differences here, so we have to look beyond "well Israel is 75% Jewish so it's homogenous". Those Jews come from all kinds of places with all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.

So, first off, I don’t believe I have ever heard a single person describe Israel as homogenous. Any country where a full one in four of its citizens is from an ethnolinguistically and religiously different group from the other three is, by definition, not homogenous.

And yes, you note that even within the Jewish Israeli population there are significant divisions. That’s also true, and also a source of political and cultural tension within Israeli society! My understanding is that the tensions between the Ashkenazi founding stock and the later waves of Sephardic and especially Mizrahi Jews produced massive friction in Israel for the first decades of its existence. Israel is also still to this day having major issues with the differences between its Ultra-Orthodox/Haredi population versus the other strains of Judaism.

So yes, you have correctly noticed that Israel is not in fact a homogeneous country.

So yes, you have correctly noticed that Israel is not in fact a homogeneous country.

Cool, sounds like we agree that at best the homogeneity /happiness relationship is not entirely straightforward.

Israel has been engaged in a decades-long violent campaign, with periodic mass-casualty events on both sides, against a hostile ethnic group within its own borders. This is your example of a happy country?

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I mean that’s just not remotely accurate. Lebanon has several religious groups who have been in open conflict many times over its history. Maronite Christians, Orthodox Christians, both Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, Alawites, and that’s to say nothing of the masses of refugees from the Syrian conflict currently residing within its borders.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, has always been an incredibly ethnically diverse and fractious region. Pashtun, Balochs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazara, plus all kinds of obscure insular groups that still practice otherwise dead religious traditions, or who credibly claim direct descent from Alexander the Great’s wars against the Parthians a few thousand years ago.

Like, you’ve picked two of the least homogenous countries in the entire region.

I feel like this is going to be biased toward declaring groups that get along to be "homogeneous", and those that don't are subdivided into smaller groups until they do, with the broader discording factions declared "heterogeneous". You could divide the English into Anglos, Saxons, Normans, and so on, but they still mostly get along so you'll call them all "English".

What is homogeneity if not ethnic cohesion? Everyone is their own group of one and human divisions are fractal. Boundaries exist because we decide they do.

Ethnic groups only exist insofar as they are willing to exclude. Which is why Anglos, Saxons and Normans no longer exist, but English do. Fusions and splits are common methods of ethnogenesis.

It's not a bias, it's the phenomenal definition of ethnic groups.

Part of homogeneity is common ethnic consciousness, commonality in language, religion, ancestry, insufficient history of remaining grudges and bad blood, etc. The later element, if it existed in the past, has declined today. The English are one ethnic group, even with some heterogeneous elements and diversity in their history.

Ethnic groups have some heterogeneity in them. As with most things, the amount matters. Increase substantially differences, and you get a nation comprising of different groups. This is a genuine difference that relates to accurately separating ethnic groups.

This doesn't bias things, since you still got a homogeneous situation if the divisions are sufficiently irrelevant and have a robustly common identity. Conversely you get heterogeneity when divisions are significant and ethnic groups don't get along. You are getting an accurate message that proves the advantages of a homogeneous country and of small enough differences among the people, so much so that they can be identified as a common ethnic group.

The distinctions between Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Britons, Normans, etc. washed out hundreds of years ago, though. Nobody in England has spoken Norman French in over 500 years. Back when these groups were still linguistically and culturally distinct, they absolutely did not get along - see the wars between the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and then famously the conquest and subsequent violent subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans. It’s only in hindsight, after a centuries-long process of mixing and integration, that we consider these to be constituent ancestries of a unified population. (And of course the existence of Wales as a separate entity, and the revival of the Welsh language, are testaments to the fact that the pre-Anglo-Saxon Britonic people were in fact never fully integrated, despite centuries of effort.)

Meanwhile, in Lebanon and Afghanistan these groups are still very distinct, generally geographically segregated, and - again, most importantly - have been in open violent conflict at various times even within your and my lifetimes.

Housing unaffordability remains near all time highs.

unemployment has begun to rise (now 6.6%) but for 15-24 year olds its nearly 20%

Canada's total fertility rate data for 2023 came out last week and shows a big drop to 1.26

I'd say the cause and effect is clear here. If young people can't get homes or jobs, then they won't be in a position to start a family.

The responsible middle class couple has a high floor of material attainment before starting a family. Price these people out of it and they'll not start families.

It's gotten really, really bad lately. I visited my family in Nova Scotia over the summer and I was just completely stunned at how utterly the demographics of my small rural hometown had changed, even over just the last decade. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every service worker I interacted with was Indian, Pakistani, or some other flavor of subcontinental. This in a town of ~4000 that was 97% white in 2001. Both of the local pizza joints which I fondly remember from my childhood have been sold to immigrants and the staff completely replaced. I haven't really looked into it, but as I understand it most of these workers are not strictly immigrants, they're there on some kind of education visa that allows them to work (and allegedly businesses are subsidized for hiring them -- not sure how accurate that is, but it's what locals are claiming.) There have always been "temporary foreign workers" involved in agriculture but the recent changes are just categorically different. (Professionals such as doctors and other medical specialists have also been mostly sourced from India for a while, but there were generally fewer complaints about that.)

Property prices have also increased commensurately, but none of the homeowners I spoke with felt particularly "enriched" because the increase is basically global and even if they cashed out there's nowhere else to move to. Some own lakeside cottages that they plan to retreat to; most aren't so lucky.

The mood is generally quite dour. I don't think anyone expected such a rapid demographic change was even possible, and it doesn't seem like something they can vote their way out of.

Isn't the issue that Canadian doctors & especially nurses move to the US ?

And why wouldn't they? Identical culture, no further than Canadian cities are from each other and an immediate 2-3x pay bump.

Same applies to Tech & Finance. Canada is facing the exact same problem as middle America. All jobs are in the regional economic hub. Not enough young to run these small towns, because the young are leaving. Those regional hubs are in Coastal USA : primarily California and the NE corridor. A Nova Scotian is both physically and culturally closer to New England, than many American states are to each other.

staff completely replaced

We're the previous staff out of a job or did they more to better things ?

I don't want to make it sound like I'm make light of what's clearly a drastic change. Seems like the locals didn't want it. And small towns can't sustain their existing culture in the face of such rapid change. I empathize.

One question. How do these towns of 4000 survive in the first place ?

Nova Scotia is the world's largest exporter of Christmas trees, lobster, gypsum, and wild berries

Sounds like a low skill resource based economy. It doesn't sound like immigrants are coming in to take the jobs. Sounds more blue-collar owners have stopped working, and started delegating. Canadians aren't reproducing. The few young are leaving for urban areas. Someone has to catch the fish and cut the trees. IMO, might as well be immigrants. I understand if people don't want immigrants. But, are there any young locals to do these jobs at all ? How do you think these villages would survive otherwise ?

And that’s why I’m so terrified about the current election in the states. It seems like if the Dems win, then permanent demographic change (with one party state).

In principle the natives could vote out the politicians and pursue a deportation strategy. But the natives while firmly being anti migration are slightly more divided compared to the unified group of new voters.

Isn’t permanent demographic change already inevitable? In 1950, the United States was 89.5% white, 10% black, and 0.5% other. By 2000, the U.S. was 75.1% white, 12.3% black, and 12.6% other. As of 2020, the United States is 61.6% white (57.8% non-Hispanic white), 12.4% black, and 26% other. You can see stats on other years here. Today, every age group under 25 is now less than 50% non-Hispanic white. There’s no reversing that.

Yes, but the magnitude matters. America becoming ~45% non-Hispanic white and 25% Hispanic is baked in now.

However, keep legal plus illegal immigration at 3 million plus for another generation and the demographic shares will continue to shift (toward more black and Asian specifically). It will be very different from current no matter what, but how different is tbd.

Yes, but the magnitude matters. America becoming ~45% non-Hispanic white and 25% Hispanic is baked in now.

Yeah, but that means an overall white majority, because many of those Hispanics are white.

...as are blacks who vote Republican if NBC and Joe Biden are to believed.

There’s no reversing that.

Fully, no, but I'd be interested in statistics on what the racial makeup would look like if the 20 or 30 biggest cities got deleted; my eyeball says they tend somewhat more minority (especially black).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population

Looks like we'd lose a lot of our Asians, but just eyeballing the list there'd be plenty of large black and Hispanic populations left.

"If we get nuked at least we'd have got rid of some blacks" is certainly one of the takes.

I'm really just curious what kind of a train of thought led you to that.

"If we get nuked at least we'd have got rid of some blacks" is certainly one of the takes.

I'm making an Is statement, not an Ought statement.

I'm really just curious what kind of a train of thought led you to that.

Nuclear war is on my mind a fair bit, especially right now since October's a good month for amphibious invasion of Taiwan and the USA has a known demented President and an election campaign in progress that's seen a disqualification attempt and two assassination attempts already (and the election being a shitshow was predictable years in advance). So when somebody makes a statement that seems to discount nuclear war as a possibility, it pings my "someone is wrong on the internet" instinct.

Probably—but it can get worse.

Today, every age group under 25 is now less than 50% non-Hispanic white. There’s no reversing that.

Not with that attitude!

The premier of Nova Scotia wants to double the population of the province by 2060. To achieve that would require immigration like NS has seen over the past 3 years repeated at the same level for the next 35. And he's the conservative.

It would be wrong to break down the way Canadian politics operates with respect to immigration as a conservative/liberal split. It is more coherently a young vs old dynamic, and somewhat even more pointedly people who own property vs people who don't.

Up until very recently there was a very strong national pro-immigration consensus across pretty much the entire political spectrum and all demographics, with the one exception being a fringe national party (People's Party). Canada was by a decent margin the most welcoming country to new immigrants and perceptions of the immigration system in general were strongly favourable. This was I think in part a reflection that the system itself was well-designed: priority to well-off, educated immigrants who spoke either national language.

The capital "I" immigration rate has gone up, but people don't really have a problem with this. More concerning to Canadians has been the growth in other types of migrants: international students, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers/refugees. It's these categories that have driven the massive increases in population. For example in 2023 the breakdown was 477k new immigrants (i.e., foreign nationals offered permanent residence) and ~ 1.3 million "temporary" residents.

While the federal Liberals have certainly enabled and to a large part driven the abuse of these other flows of migration, they have not been the only bad actors. Provincial conservative-run governments have absolutely followed them in this race to rebuild Punjab in Canada. Together they have in the course of about two years absolutely destroyed the national consensus on immigration.

I think the pre-2015 immigration consensus was only partly to do with selectivity. The numbers were still high, but they went overwhelmingly to large cities that were already multicultural— especially their large suburbs. It was possible to live in Canada from 2000 to 2015 say and not perceive the rapid changes because they were occurring in Brampton. And critically, because they were so concentrated and numbers not insane, housing could respond. As recently as 2015, housing outside of the top 3 metros wasn’t just affordable it was cheap.

Now it’s everywhere. Every small town. Every neighborhood.

Yeah, I had a similar experience to you going back home last month and finding out the old hairdressing place I went to as a kid is now all Indians. And the grocery store I went to as a kid is all Indians. Etc. etc. I live in a very diverse part of Toronto so it's not like I'm easily shocked or whatever. Hell, even in my neighbourhood we're a lot different than three years ago, because the Filipinos and Chinese and African immigrants have been shunted out by Indians too. My brother-in-law who lived in Toronto for a decade was very surprised when he came back this year, and remarked how Toronto feels so much less diverse now that Indians are forming a new pseudo-majority in many neighbourhoods or employment sectors.

In my personal life I engage with a lot of well-off Torontonians, the type who have historically been among the most pro-Liberal (capital L) and pro-immigration. They have up until recently been insulated from the effects of immigration while benefiting enormously from higher property values and depressed wages. It's finally creeping up on them too: it's car thefts and the fact that their kids (like high-school, university age) can't get jobs. There are no typical student jobs left anymore. McDonalds? Grocery store? Retail? Forget it. There are a dozen people from Punjab for every Canadian kid, and they will put up with a lot more shit. These well-off Canadians are finally starting to realize they've created a country that is hostile to their children.

Anybody who has qualms with these developments is a racist white supremacist and no true progressive. Those who object to the rise in immigration are dogwhistling xenophobes who are covertly advocating for racist policies and non-inclusion of marginalized ethnic minorities.

Liam Kofi Bright has written that "the culture war is sustained by a material inequality that no one is seriously trying to fix" - except for Trudeau, who has done more to fix this imbalance in the distribution of resources between whites and colored people people of colour than any other Prime Minister in the history of this country.

Any progressive who is actually serious about effecting social change (and not merely screaming about it on the internet or using the ideology as a cudgel to beat their enemies into submission) would "give away their property and superior opportunities" to marginalized groups to actually bring an end to systemic inequality. This includes, yes, giving hard-working immigrants from the third world, who did not grow up with the white privilege of an upbringing in a materially wealthy nation with superior access to education and career opportunities, a chance to improve their lives in Canada.

If anything, the growing disdain with the policies of the Trudeau administration is revealing that when push comes to shove, and white progressives are asked to make material sacrifices to uphold and stick to their principles, they immediately step down from their high pulpit of moral superiority and inclusivity. There is no free lunch, and this is what it takes to ensure that marginalized groups can also get a slice of the pie; you cannot have your cake and eat it too by simultaneously demanding material equity and then crying when those same materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour. This is the exact dynamic Liam Kofi Bright outlines in the previously linked paper, "White Psychodrama." White progressives should either put up, grin and bear the cost of the very same social justice they demanded through bloody cancellation and mob invective, or end the charade and shut the fuck up.

disproportionately low skill

compete with young Canadians

This sounds more like an indictment of young Canadians, their lack of skills, and their inability to compete in the marketplace with those who will do their exact same entry-level service job, except for lower pay, and for longer hours. Immigrants are hard-working, ambitious, and (possibly even literally) hungry for success. Their lack of access to said opportunities instills within them a greater work ethic and drive to succeed when they don't have the Bank of White Mummy and Daddy to catch them when they fall after their six-year all expenses paid academic career in Theatrical Non-Binary Basket Weaving fails to take off. Why should white Canadians feel that their white privilege of being born in a deeply racist country entitles them to continue upholding the institutions of racism by denying ethnic minorities a job that they can do just as well as a white? What entitles these already privileged whites to a job over minorities?

Prime Minister Trudeau gave an interview where he said: “Housing needs to retain its value. It’s a huge part of people’s potential retirement and future and nest egg.

As an ethnic minority homeowner, I agree, and I refuse to let whites claw back the very same resources they loudly and proudly proclaimed they wanted to redistribute to marginalized folk like myself.

  • -17

You are triggering my sarcasm meter, but hey - goody for you. I can't wait for unrestricted immigration so everyone gets to find out what it's like to be a Chinese gaokao examinee.

Meritocracy means you lose when you aren't good enough. For the bottom 99.99999% of us, trivially identifiable by the ocean of data harvested every single day, this means we might as well not exist. Let's peacefully hold hands and walk into the most cost-effective euthanasia chambers possible, so the better ones can move into the future!

Your comment is triggering Poe's law for me. The sarcasm is too sincere for me to be 100% sure. I'm hoping my reply makes sense irrespective of your intent.

Rapid change of any sort doesn't work. It's practically a law of nature. Wealth (20th century Saudi), Land (South Africa), Agency (Liberia) or Demographics.

A progressive may support the logical endpoint of their philosophy. But even in ideal circumstances, truly redistributive outcomes cannot be achieved overnight. It's well known social science, but progressive countries ignore it. They utilize 'rapid immigration as national policy', but never stage their immigration to allow for win-win outcomes.

Singapore does it right (Lee Kwan Yew is always right. Motherfucker). America brute forces it, hogs the literal best of the world and wins. But, Western Europe & Canada seem to be confused about what they want in their immigrants.

If you want model citizens, then don't import low skill men, aged 20-30. They're are bad immigrants everywhere. This cohort commits the vast majority of crime. If you want them to integrate, import young college students (to schools with majority Canadians) or 30+ low skill men with families and toddlers who can be 'civilized' from day 1. Your nation needs nurses and women are good immigrants.....so start nursing programs. If small towns need labor, then sprinkle families which have incentive to drop roots and integrate....rather than bringing all young men to 1 town, who room-up and ghettoize.

Sweden, Germany, Southern France, Canada....It's all the same. The immigrant group differs in each place. But the haphazard and almost suicidal choice of how immigrants are sub-sampled guarantees bad outcomes. Honestly, 'refugee' and 'asylee' are such shit categories. Too easy to game when you come from a desperate situation from your home country.

If anything, the growing disdain with the policies of the Trudeau administration is revealing that when push comes to shove, and white progressives are asked to make material sacrifices to uphold and stick to their principles, they immediately step down from their high pulpit of moral superiority and inclusivity. There is no free lunch, and this is what it takes to ensure that marginalized groups can also get a slice of the pie; you cannot have your cake and eat it too by simultaneously demanding material equity and then crying when those same materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour. This is the exact dynamic Liam Kofi Bright outlines in the previously linked paper, "White Psychodrama." White progressives should either put up, grin and bear the cost of the very same social justice they demanded through bloody cancellation and mob invective, or end the charade and shut the fuck up.

What I suspect in this case is something like what’s happening in the USA. The elites want the immigrants to drive up costs of goods (increased population leading to increased demand) and to hold down wages. This is how immigrants tend to improve the economy of the country they go to. On the one hand, as new arrivals, they’d need housing, and all the stuff that comes with it. They will need furniture, vehicles, clothes, shoes, kids need school supplies etc. probably toys. So the price of these things go up because suddenly you have doubled the size of the town and thus driven up demand. At the same time, their expectations for wages are dirt cheap— and this delights the business owners who can now bid down the cost of labor (and BONUS! Get points for your work to increase diversity) and even skimp on safety and health rules as third world countries have poor conditions and the workers aren’t going to complain about treatment that while bad by first world standards is wonderful for people used to poor conditions at the workplace. OSHA (and the Canadian equivalent) don’t exist in most developing countries.

So the benefits are the support depends very much on which side of the class divide you sit on. If you’re part of the investment class, immigration is net positive. The stocks will go up, GDP goes up, labor becomes cheaper and more compliant. If your on the working class side, your wages stagnate, your costs go up, your kids are denied opportunities for work (to make room for the cheaper and more compliant immigrant population who won’t complain or ask for raises) their schools spend more effort to teach immigrants English than getting your kids prepared for life after high school.

And there is the reason for the lack of support. It’s a battle between the beneficiary class who wants all these immigrants and the benefits they offer to their social class, vs the working class that all of this is happening too. They don’t like that their wages aren’t going up, or that the new immigrants are allowing dirty and dangerous conditions on the job. They don’t like the resources that should be going to the school computer lab instead being shunted to hiring scores of ESL teachers and textbooks written in whatever language the kids speak.

This sounds more like an indictment of young Canadians, their lack of skills, and their inability to compete in the marketplace with those who will do their exact same entry-level service job, except for lower pay, and for longer hours. Immigrants are hard-working, ambitious, and (possibly even literally) hungry for success. Their lack of access to said opportunities instills within them a greater work ethic and drive to succeed when they don't have the Bank of White Mummy and Daddy to catch them when they fall after their six-year all expenses paid academic career in Theatrical Non-Binary Basket Weaving fails to take off. Why should white Canadians feel that their white privilege of being born in a deeply racist country entitles them to continue upholding the institutions of racism by denying ethnic minorities a job that they can do just as well as a white? What entitles these already privileged whites to a job over minorities?

I think you have a wildly skewed idea of the kinds of people who live in small towns. These people don’t have the resources you think they do. They’re mostly working class. The immigrants are not taking the jobs of high skilled graduates, they’re taking jobs from the working class. And working class people don’t actually have the bank of dad to fall back on. So when they don’t get early work experience it’s an economic setback. Further, these people might be trying to support a family. The advantage immigrants have is that they’re cheap and compliant. They might work a bit harder, but the main thing is that they won’t ewww try to get better wages or conditions. They’ll work for peanuts and sleep 3-4 families to a house so they can live on $10 an hour. No first world labor can afford to work for that little, but now that we have immigrants, you can forget about your wages going up. But remember, if you’re not in favor of being underbid by imported labor, you’re a white privileged racist.

Sounds like you are one or two generations removed from a country in the global south. Here is a hypothetical for you.

Imagine there was a 20% white Mormon minority in your country. They immigrate in large numbers and have more kids per woman than the native born. The flow is so large they don’t need to assimilate in any significant way and within 3 generations they become majority of your society.

Imagine their cultural norms start to change how people interact in your culture and it begins to change politics in a way you dislike. For instance, suppose they insist that “materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour” and they use politics to do it. People like you are discriminated against in hiring to give these newcomers a leg up since they are disproportionately poor. You and your kids hear endlessly, everywhere that your society is evil and you owe a blank check to these people.

Just try to inhabit the thought experiment for a second. What emotion do you feel? If you are a normal person, its probably a deep sense of loss – the “black pill” so to speak. The other obvious response is to ask “why do I owe these people anything? I am not gaining anything from their presence. Hell, they owe me for what I am sacrificing!” And indeed you are sacrificing: In sufficient numbers immigration entails the destruction of a society and its replacement with something else. The buildings might remain the same, but everything else would have changed. I’d say those Mormons owed you an enormous debt. And if you decided you wanted to avoid that outcome altogether – that your homeland was the only homeland you had and was worth preserving – then you would be a totally normal person, and your preference should be respected.

On non-inclusion of minorities and racism

Institutions and individuals should treat people equally in the equal-before-the-law Jeffersonian sense. This is what the majority owes the minority. One of the worst things about Canada's mass immigration plus wokeness is that we are jettisoning that sense of equality for equality measured by equal outcomes by group.

The minority owes the majority assimilation. Multiculturalism was a mistake. I take the deep roots thesis seriously: assimilation is a multi-generational process and often a two-way process where the native born can assimilate backwards to newcomer norms. Societies are basically a weighted average of the cultures that make it up, tending towards the lowest common denominator for things like trust – i.e. a high-trust culture can be destroyed once a certain threshold of low-trust people enter it. Your post is frankly full of ethnic resentment against whites, why would I want more of this in my society?

Even though I do believe in the equal treatment principle, that principle is compatible with caring about the future of your society and its culture. I don’t think Canadian culture is improved by admixture of 10% more Indian norms and aesthetics — or those of anyone else for that matter. Minorities should remain small so the assimilation pull towards the mainstream is very strong and the cultural substrate that is Anglo-French Canada can persist into the future. This is what the majority owes itself if it has any self respect.

On Canada living up to its ideals

Your specific point on Canada seems to be that Trudeau is actually delivering the goods that progressives seem to promise and Canada’s coming rejection of Trudeau-ism is hypocrisy. I think that is basically fair and is an indictment of progressivism. I’d only add three things: First when progressives want to redistribute resources on the basis of ethnicity, they are committing a grave injustice. Second, Trudeau’s Liberals have not actually done any of that redistribution. The beneficiaries of his policies are principally old white boomers who own houses. The losers are young people -- disproportionately non-white -- who live in major cities and have inherited more debt, more costly housing, and a worse job market. And third, even if you think that everyone is entitled to the opportunity to live in Canada as you do (and I definitely don’t), the intergenerational transfer from young to old represented by forcing young Canadians to compete with the global poor for work and housing is socially destabilizing and should be opposed for that reason alone.

As an ethnic minority homeowner, I agree, and I refuse to let whites claw back the very same resources they loudly and proudly proclaimed they wanted to redistribute to marginalized folk like myself.

They should never have loudly and proudly proclaimed it. And a fixation on housing as a store of wealth is a feature of immigrant cultures (especially Chinese and Indian) that has caused enormous harm to Canada and I would love to see it sent back.

While I don’t disagree with the main thrust of your post, you appear to have taken the bait of a troll. See this comment by the same user, whose profile is presumably private to keep people from keeping track of the various troll posts, for a general flavor of said user’s meager output.

Oof.

I mean I suspected he was a troll at first, but it was so elaborate complete with the nonsensical woke sociology links.

Million dollar question- so young Canadians want to leave, or no?

Like legal immigration to the US, Australia, etc is generally not easy, but is the mood among young Canadians a ‘we better get out of here’, yet?

Every young Canadian I've met thinks "America, Amirite?" Is the peak of humor and social commentary. They aren't going to move somewhere with guns and racism, which of course define the US.

I think Canadian men see American wages, which are often 2x for high skill professions and are very interested.

Then their wives remind them about abortion, no maternity leave, and school shootings and that’s the end of the conversation.

I think migration interest is highly gendered.

Can someone steelman why a wife would care enough about abortion that said wife would tank a doubling of income and a better life? That just seems insane.

The other two are a misunderstanding and innumeracy

It's signaling, not reason.

Because expressing a willingness to move to America, especially a red state, from Canada impugns your progressive bona fides among your friends.

It really is that simple: “did you hear Claire is moving to Texas? I could never do that. Too many MAGAs down there, it’s crazy that she thinks she would fit in there. I went to Tampa once and everyone at the beach was white and you just know they all voted Trump. I was super uncomfortable”

But honestly who cares? If you are moving to the US, you will be forced to develop a new social group. So why care about the old?

Then their wives remind them about abortion, no maternity leave, and school shootings and that’s the end of the conversation.

LOL. The jobs with 2x pay are in places with plenty of abortion and maternity leave (though we're somewhat cruel and will only allow one or the other at a given time).

There are plenty of very high salaries available in red states.

Yes, and id wager those salaries go farther too.

Part of the pitch i use when recruiting from blue states is; What's the point of making 100 - 200k a year if you're going to end up spending 90% of that to live in a filing cabinet and take the bus or subway to work? Come to [redacted], buy a 5 year old luxury car, and enjoy driving to work on clean well-maintained streets and living in an actual house.

Yeah, the salience of tail risk in decision making is quite a difference. And on Mat leave in particular, half the point of going to the US for a Canadian is to escape the two-income trap anyways.

They aren't going to move somewhere with guns and racism, which of course define the US.

Unless they can get a job paying twice as much, then it's like "TN-1, HERE I COME".

Canadas emigration numbers are about 40,000 a year which is very low. However, Canadian statistics have a huge gap in the measurement of emigration. They often make errors of 5 or 6 figures in a year and it’s only when the census is conducted that we know what has actually happened in the interim.

All we can really say is anecdotally, there is a huge outflow happening. I recently moved and the previous occupant of my house moved to the States. One of my friends became an ex-pat in Europe last summer and another just sold his place and is moving to Colombia. Yes anecdotal, but this hasn’t happened in my friend group before.

What we do have good stats on is people moving within country and the migration out of major cities is accelerating. It’s always been true that major cities are population sinks with low fertility and outmigration of natives to be replaced with immigrants. Recently , this has picked up and smaller Canadian cities like Halifax or Victoria have seen big inflows (ruining their housing markets too).

So people are responding with action which is great to see, but politically this is going to be the greatest ever repudiation of the left in Canada. The conservatives are polling at 47% among the young.

So people are responding with action which is great to see, but politically this is going to be the greatest ever repudiation of the left in Canada. The conservatives are polling at 47% among the young.

It will be interesting to see what the Conservatives actually do if (when) they form government. So far Poilievre has only offered the vaguest commitments to reducing inflow (saying things like he will "match immigration to rate of homebuilding").

The Conservative Party has historically been reliant on industries that take advantage of TFWs/international students. Almost half their MPs are landlords. They don't really want to slow this down anymore than the Liberals do. The swing of the youth vote towards them is in large part predicated on anti-immigration sentiment, so how do they reconcile this?

Luckily for them the Liberals have given them so much room to maneuver this is less of threading the needle and more finding your way out of an open door. Even cutting the inflow by half would leave them at roughly double the rate of the Harper years.

Almost half their MPs are landlords.

That seems oddly low- in the states I would assume that most people wealthy enough to be in congress own at least a renthouse or two.

I happened to speak with two Canadians this month and in both cases housing was brought up. One told me that there were too many immigrants arriving too fast but that their country of origin was immaterial, and in any case Canadians don’t have a right to complain because of the residential schools controversy. The other told me point blank there were way too many Indians arriving, that it is ruining the country and that they would vote for Trump if they lived in America. The former was a white Canadian of colonial stock and the latter was a first-gen Pakistani replete with accent.

As a migrant who mainly works with migrants , the complaints about housing and traffic are identical to what you'd assume the white "racist" would say.

It's at the point where more secure migrants are annoyed at the last wave.

Canadians don’t have a right to complain because of the residential schools controversy

I hate the idea that the residential schools narrative (and narratives of similar nature) could be so effective. How do you even begin to deprogram such a person?

Maybe just callously adopting your local equivalent of 'Armenian genocide? made up nonsense, and they deserved it all anyway' is the meta. Admittedly I'm biased in that direction.

I mean, residential school mass graves are quite literally made up.

When the "graves" were dug up and showed that the interpretations of ground penetrating data were not evidence of graves, the narrative immediately pivoted to 'starting a conversation'.

Its the rallying cry of idiots caught with their pants down, and our mistake is thinking being caught out is a bad thing for these grifters. The point of a grift is attention. They don't need to be correct or right, just be the juiciest butt progressives can parasite their social media onto for self edification.

Have you guys heard of Welcome To Country? Its basically land acknowledgments but somehow cringier, performed in Australia everyfuckingwhere especially at government level. I am 100% sure they originated as a tokenistic way of fobbing off the concerns of 'indigenous' communities.

While the aussies seem largely uncaring or sick of this government grovelling, the Canadians have been absolutely enthralled by it. White Canadians drooling at the prospect of demonstrating their progressive credentials, to further set themselves apart from their brutal southern kins.

I honestly think the Canadians are going the way of the Scots. A funny accented people whose entire modern existence is defined by differentiating themselves as much as possible from their far more successful and relevant southern brothers, with an almost ironic fetishization of a local orange-brown liquid. Thankfully for the Canadians Maple Syrup is actually good, unlike that disgusting abomination Irn-Bru.

unlike that disgusting abomination Irn-Bru.

Now that I know about this, I would be quite interested in finding a way to try it without having to actually visit that cursed island.

And Canadian accents aren't that funny.

Having recently visited said cursed island (which was delightful and I highly recommend) I can safely say Irn Bru trying was the worst part of the trip. That includes a trip to the cliffs of Mohr that was so foggy we practically couldn't see our hands held out in front of our faces.

You can buy bubblegum soda in the US, Irn Bru is just that.

You can buy it in Ireland too.

It's an overly sweet bubblegum flavour drink that makes cherryade seem sophisticated and grown up.

While the aussies seem largely uncaring or sick of this government grovelling

Depends on the Aussie. People I've met from Melbourne were devastated when the voice referendum failed. I doubt they mind land acknowledgements.

Thankfully for the Canadians Maple Syrup is actually good,

How dare you try to appropriate what rightfully belongs to the Green Mountain State!

The other told me point blank there were way too many Indians arriving, that it is ruining the country and that they would vote for Trump if they lived in America. The former was a white Canadian of colonial stock and the latter was a first-gen Pakistani replete with accent.

Was this an attitude toward South Asian immigrants generally, or a reflection of Indian-Pakistani animosity? I'm assuming the former, but I've seen the latter around from time to time (my favorite example was a mixed group of second-generation students mocking that their parents probably hated each other).

I was told by this person that said animosity completely goes away upon migrating to the West, that Pakistanis hate Indians because they are “uneducated”.

Let’s say the resident school controversy was true. As best I can make out the logic, it is:

  1. Europeans came here and took land from the native population.

  2. Natives suffered as a result.

  3. As a descendent of those Europeans, I am morally responsible.

  4. Therefore it is a good thing if a new population comes here and harms the current natives (ie me).

It seems quite odd to me. First, it assumes generational guilt. And if that is true, then maybe the original natives “deserved” it. It also implies the new population while enacting justice is committing a wrong. Very confusing.

Well, if we did this to the Indians, it's only fair that the Indians get to do it to us.

More seriously, I think that especially among young Canadians, there is a sense that progressive policies have failed. As I write this, I'm walking by a sign advertising our local progressive party (The NDP). The sign sits in front of a number of tents containing the homeless (or "unhoused people"). 9 years ago, when I moved into this neighborhood, it was still not a good neighborhood, but there weren't visible crack pipes, dirty needles, or homeless people shrieking profanities all through the night. The BC NDP decriminalizing drugs has visibly led to an explosion in the homeless population and general appearance of decay.

I live in a rent controlled building. My rent is around $1200 CAD monthly, compared to what would be around $2700 CAD if I were to move in today. The progressive party has failed at keeping life affordable for the middle class (and their federal counterparts literally voted to keep increasing demand on housing.)

What I think has happened is that the youth have reached a point where it is literally impossible to survive with the progressive policies. The insulation that the standard progressive has against the negative repercussions of their policies has been worn away, and when they cry uncle, the government they elected doubles down on the policies hurting them.

It's easy to be progressive when it just means being nice. It's much harder when it means that you rent a tiny shoebox for the rest of your life, and can't start a family, or travel, or do anything but eck out an existence for the corporate overlords the progressives swear they opposed, but who somehow keep doing better and better. And all the while, the government keeps upping taxes, but somehow they're all gone by the time you're supposed to see them.

It’s quite interesting. In New Zealand, the leader of the anti-immigration party is a Maori. But Māori likely have more influence in New Zealand than the first nations do in Canada.

Adding to the confusion, only the guilt is transmitted forward through time. For some reason, none of the credit for building a first world country follows.

The same people saying "You must feel bad for the horrible things your ancestors did" will not even skip a beat before saying "you can't feel pride for the great things your ancestors achieved." So conveniently you can't assume any credit for creating a successful nation, but you get to feel blame for what happened to any minorities or natives who suffered during its creation, just in case you thought those two factors might balance out the ledger.

I am utterly unclear as to the mechanism that allows blame to propagate forward through time and generations but doesn't allow credit and pride to propagate as well.

Some of them hate whites, some of them are aware of the internal tension, and some of them see a sort of collective guilt that needs to be repaired by incorporating minorities into the broader structure of society.

ETA: there's also some revisionist pseudohistory about how blacks/natives/whatever really built the nice societies in question, but I don't think it's the dominant strain of thought.

I am utterly unclear as to the mechanism that allows blame to propagate forward through time and generations but doesn't allow credit and pride to propagate as well.

It's not about a mechanism. It's bullshit wordcelry.

The entire thing exists to harm what's left of the culture of your people and to deprive you of power. That was explicitly stated by the people who made it up, except nobody bothers to read marxist books but people paid to do so or lunatics. Trying to tease about the internal consistency of an ideology seeking your dispossession is just crazy.

Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution" goes about the genesis of that bullshit in excruciating, mind numbing details, it's also widely available.

I feel like Canadians used to be very smug about being a first world nation. America with +40% niceness and +20% multiculturalism basically.

I don't know what happened. My social circle has narrowed in terms of ethnic Anglo/native-born Canadians outside of a few at work and my media diet is extremely Americanized (and hyper-guilt driven) so maybe I don't see it as much (or people really are just tired after the recent migrant wave). On the other hand that may be true of Canadians themselves, which might explain the increased pessimism. Or whatever common factor drove the hope-and-change era around the time I arrived in both countries is just done everyone is now more pessimistic.

I am utterly unclear as to the mechanism that allows blame to propagate forward through time and generations but doesn't allow credit and pride to propagate as well.

Other countries didn't succeed in becoming first world nations because Canada/America/the West's success is based on their exploitation. Simple.

Other countries didn't succeed in becoming first world nations because Canada/America/the West's success is based on their exploitation. Simple.

Doesn't really work when you can see how Japan recover from nukes and occupation, or Singapore vaulting to first World status and becoming a beacon of civilization, with little apparent exploitation of other nations.

Works even less when you notice that places like Rhodesia and South America were pretty much first-world or close second-world countries right up until the Western influence withdrew.

I said it was simple, not that you would find it credible. But that's the argument.

You start giving counter-examples and you'll hear about Haiti's reparations, slaves building America, coups in LatAm, how India had X% of the world's GDP before Britain looted it, bad borders in Africa and the ME, sanctions against Zimbabwe meanwhile honorary white Japan (which was spared colonialism - somehow) was needed as a bulwark against the Soviets and so was treated relatively well. They have explanations, it's just a matter of how much you think they're cope (I've swung over to the "cope" side but I change most of my opinions an average of every eight years and I'm in the "converted zealot" stage and it's really not helpful for digging out nuance.)

It may not hold up but it's the closest thing to a coherent justification for the asymmetry I've seen.

You asked for some theory that would allow one and not the other, not just an explanation of nakedly self-serving behavior. I doubt anyone needs to hear "my opponents want me to believe things that help them and to avoid things that don't" from me.

No, I get that.

Its just every epicycle they have to add makes it less credible to me.

It is one thing to point to some guy who inherited wealth built on the backs of actual slaves or exploitation, and say that maybe he doesn't deserve everything he has.

Quite another to point at somebody who just happened to be born into a civilization that was built in part on the back of slaves and through exploitation of weaker neighbors, and claim that just because his ancestors bled, died, and labored to build a nation so nice that everybody wants to move there he doesn't get to be proud of himself... and he also should feel guilt for all the people that were exploited to build the nation (which includes his ancestors, mind!).

I've said it elsewhere, the lesson of politics since about 2010 is "identity politics and racial grievances are a great way to get others to do what you want and give you their stuff."

Of course the end state of this is leftists revolting against nature. It always is. Some nations were bequeathed huge stores of natural bounty, some were not, and this determined their future courses to some huge degree. The only way to correct for this is to move that natural bounty around until every place on earth can obtain some kind of parity.

Of course it's less credible. It's naught but bare faced lies with the purpose of destroying all that we hold dear.

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meanwhile honorary white Japan (which was spared colonialism - somehow)

When the threat of colonization became apparent, they built themselves up into a modern state.

Which itself is a rather good refutation of the nonsense theories about how the plight of the Third World is all due to the First World, but you'll never get anyone who believes it to change their mind.

Reading the actual history of the Meiji restoration, it seems to have been dependent on the samurai class producing vast numbers of geniuses engaged in pointless bureaucracy they could be pulled off of without anyone noticing. It would be like the Hasidim deciding collectively, overnight, that they need to build an industrial economy and so their best and brightest have to be moved off of torah study to learn chip design or whatever.

Most colonized societies didn't have anywhere near the ability to do this. If we assume the samurai class had the same IQ advantage over the commoners that college graduates do over the hoi polloi in the USA(probably an underestimate) we're looking at a class of people with an average IQ similar to Ashkenazi Jews, who had quite literally nothing to do so they were given sinecures commanding vast resources with enforcing social conservatism as their only responsibility, and a single point of authority to rally around when it was apparent times needed to change, and a pre-existing tradition of employing literal geniuses in copying western technology. Those ingredients were rare in isolation; together they existed only in Japan.

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It is honestly a weird self hatred

Eric Adams indicted

NYC mayor Eric Adams has been indicted in federal court. The indictment details a scheme where he took illegal benefits from Turkey in a quid-pro-quo scheme, and there's an additional scheme where he applied for matching campaign funds using illegal campaign contributions. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/26/us/whats-in-nyc-mayor-eric-adams-indictment/index.html

The indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams unsealed Thursday morning alleges he secretly solicited and accepted freebies and illegal campaign donations from wealthy foreigners, including Turkish officials, as far back as 2014.

In exchange, he pressured the Fire Department of New York to approve the opening of a new Turkish consular building in the city without a fire inspection, the indictment states. In addition, his campaign used those illegal campaign donations to “steal public funds” through New York City’s matching funds, according to the indictment.

Those allegations represent the core of the federal indictment charging Adams with five counts: bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and two counts of soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals.

Adams, a Democrat elected in 2021, has denied wrongdoing and said he does not plan to resign.

“I look forward to defending myself and defending the people of this city as I’ve done throughout my entire professional career,” Adams said.

And that's pretty much the meat of it. There's the full indictment in the link if you want to read 56 pages of legalese.

Naturally, the right wing punditsphere is speculating that this dropped because Adams is critical of the open border, but I think it more likely that he just got caught, and maybe there's some sort of low-profile diplomatic dustup with Turkey that got the FBI investigating Turkish influence in the US. Bigger question- what are the odds he tries to play up that story in the hopes of a Trump pardon? I suspect that if he was going to pull an Eric Johnson over his disagreements with the DNC(and he is not a standard democrat) he would have already done it, but there doesn't seem to be much way he can really dispute these charges and federal courts almost always convict, and Trump just might pardon him like he did Blagojevich.

I know that at an entire three days old, this thread is completely dead, but I want to observe that NYT has suddenly found Jesus on this topic, now that it's Not Trump:

Still another challenge stems from a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court that narrowed the instances in which the bribery statute applies to acts by public officials, a ruling that makes the crime more difficult to prove if the government cannot show that payoffs were made with the intent to reap a quid pro quo.

Yes, yes, there was a SCOTUS ruling recently on the bribery statute. You know what else had a SCOTUS ruling, saying that it needed to be a quid pro quo? Campaign finance laws. Almost fifteen years ago. NYT obviously didn't care when it was all about getting Trump. It had never made sense and continues to make no sense to think that Donald Trump entered into a quid pro quo with Donald Trump to exchange Donald Trump's official acts for Donald Trump's money to pay off Donald Trump's financial expense.

Naturally, the right wing didn't stop for a second to acknowledge that the Biden DOJ has indicted a major D figure.

Part and parcel of a politics where even if opponents do something completely and unambiguously right (for once), it can't be acknowledged. Which is sad, because Adams had it coming and the DOJ was absolutely right to indict him (and Hunter Biden while we're at it).

DOJ was absolutely right to indict him (and Hunter Biden while we're at it).

DOJ slow-walked the investigation so certain crimes would reach statute of limitations, indicted when they could no longer put off indicting (because Hunter kept committing embarrassing gun crimes) then gave Hunter a sweetheart plea deal that only fell through when a judge refused to rubber stamp it. DOJ gets no credit here.

Naturally, the right wing didn't stop for a second to acknowledge that the Biden DOJ has indicted a major D figure.

You could just as easily take this the other way, right wing sides with a major D figure for once.

You could just as easily take this the other way, right wing sides with a major D figure for once.

If that's the case, it's the absolutely most retarded choice.

This is a story about a Democrat mayor getting indicted under a Democrat politician, and you're whining about Republicans.

I will say that the main counterargument I’ve seen on the right is that Adams was indicted precisely because he has defied the Biden administration on immigration and policing. He notably said at a public event that the mass influx of “asylum seekers” into NYC would “destroy this city.” He will also, if removed from office, be replaced (pending a new election) by a very far-left black anti-police extremist named Juwaane Williams; this has led some to believe that Adams is being cleared out precisely to allow Williams’ ascent.

Doubt, but with sufficient room to be convinced if there's evidence.

In particular, the timelines don't make sense. The comments on fake asylum seekers are after many of the matters in the indictment.

The theory here is more along the lines that every major political figure is guilty of something, especially in a city like New York. The feds can pick and choose prosecutions if someone is perceived as worth targeting.

But the flip side is that this particular stuff Adams is alleged to have done is hilariously bad. Now, so is what a lot of the other politicians in New York have done, and at least Adams (probably?) didn't kill hundreds or thousands and try to cover it up afterwards.

((But the Adams admin has what looks to be especially damning records and attempts to destroy those records, with unusually clear theory of law. But we wouldn't know, since we don't have access to the internals of investigations against these politicians, and especially don't have access to the internal records from a complete investigation.))

On the gripping hand, the theory is unfalsifiable in the derogatory sense.

Broadly agree.

I guess I think the statement "the feds can pick and choose prosecution" needs elaboration -- do they already investigate everyone so they have dirt pre-made before they are chosen? That kind of thing seems difficult to keep under wraps -- it's not like you can have an official marker on the file that tells middle management "not for prosecution until he steps on the wrong rail", so you run the risk of someone taking it at face value. And in the worst case, the next admin can come in and actually use it.

I mean, on the other hand, his path to survival is pulling an Eric Johnson. Politically driven railroading probably isn't aimed at doing that.

I'm going to posit, without any real evidence, that this is just the tip of the iceberg for Eric Adams, and that he was pimping out his offices and the levers of power in the city government for a lot more people than just the Turks. All the corruption here is penny ante shit, if he was willing to do this, he was willing to do a lot more.

This might be what they caught him on, but there's a ton more under the surface that will come out over time, even if it never makes it to an indictment. If he was willing to take obviously corrupt offers like this in exchange for a free flight, he was taking much bigger offers for much bigger jobs.

Discussing the case at this time is probably premature until we at least start to get the rumors of the bigger stories.

I'm not disagreeing outright, but it's also not uncommon for politicians to draw a line somewhere while engaging in petty corruption. I think he'd plead guilty if it turned out he was taking all the bribes- any further corruption is going to be of the sinecures for brothers in law types. Or at least that's my two cents.

Adams was always laughably corrupt and everyone knew it, but the business establishment (as opposed to the Democratic Party) supported him over the alternative(s) because a corrupt ex-cop who is willing to support law and order cracking down on the scum was a billion times better than another defund ACAB candidate prepared to let the city rot out of ideological insanity.

And sure enough, the person lined up to replace Adams if he’s removed is an insane ACAB ideologue.

Indeed, and that’s why Hochul is wavering for now.

I"m amused that you said he was laughably corrupt while @gattsuru said mayors were hilariously corrupt.

https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1839636694376583296

A rare funny daily show segment

New Yorkers are pragmatic, but the line is fine between that and stupid (Philadelphians) and delusional (Chicagoans). I will refrain from judging other cities for now.

I'm going to find you and throw a battery at you. Go birds.

Nyc is pretty unique in scale relative to other US cities so the corruption will be different than a city like Philly or Chicago.

It's also just kinda goofy because New York mayors have been so hilariously corrupt for so long it's hard to even distinguish what counts as penne-ante anymore. Taking 10 million in matching public funds would normally be a huge deal on its own (compare the Catherine Pugh scandal, which earned her three years over smaller numbers). But deBlasio's wife lost track of 850 million, and no one cares.

and maybe there's some sort of low-profile diplomatic dustup with Turkey that got the FBI investigating Turkish influence in the US.

In 2017 (was it that long ago!) there was an incident where Turkish secret police attacked anti-Erdogan protestors in Washington DC. It might have got Turkey on the radar.

The other thing that comes to mind is Turkey holding up Finland’s NATO admission, which would line up with the timeline quite well.

To completely sidetrack the conversation, is there a way to kick members out of NATO? Because Turkey needs to go. They just kinda... suck on every dimension.

Turkey has the second biggest army in NATO and relevant geography for anything involving Russia or the Middle East.

Isn't this just 20th century thinking?

Their human capital sucks. Israel would destroy Turkey in a war despite a much smaller population and inferior geography. The world has moved on from the era of the Dreadnought. Today's it's all about raw materials, supply chains, and microchips. Turkey is a dinosaur whose poorly trained troops would only be cannon fodder in a conflict which involved the U.S.

Turkey produces their own F-16s under license-build, they export drones, they build satellites and they're even working on their own fifth-gen fighter like South Korea.

Turkey isn't Iraq, Syria or Egypt totally reliant on whatever they can import, they build things. Turkey actually managed to beat back France and Britain and escape a planned partition after WW1, they don't just instantly lose whenever Europeans show up like Arabs. They export manufactured goods: televisions and vehicles. They're 8th in steel production worldwide.

Israel has never fought any first or even second-rate militaries like Turkey, they've never fought any serious industrial powers at all and would be reliant upon nukes (in the admittedly ridiculous scenario where the US wasn't bailing them out).

Even if that is all true (and given Turkey's population size, I don't think it is; quantity has a quality all of its own), it's far better for them to be cannon fodder FOR the US than cannon fodder for the other side.

There's no official mechanism that allows removal of a member that doesn't consent. If the alliance is dependent on however the USA feels about a member at any given time this diminishes the value of joining the alliance. The value of the alliance is also diminished by an adversarial member that does adversarial things too. Maybe to a lesser extent.

There's nothing that practically stops all the other members agreeing to boot Turkey out, considering that decision "unanimous", then writing a new rule about removal after the fact. Officially the alliance member needs to consent to removal to leave.

That's all a lot of mess when NATO and the US can just wait out Erdogan and hope the next guy is more compliant. Despite the theatrics and politics they did host support for US through the GWOT. Turkey also hasn't kicked all NATO personnel out of the country recently. Which they did in the 70's as I recall. So maybe they've always been a bit of an adversarial partner in the alliance. The grandstanding, bloviating, and opportunistic haggling is the price to pay for a relatively, if not quite as important as 50 years ago, important strategic ally.

There's nothing that practically stops all the other members agreeing to boot Turkey out, considering that decision "unanimous", then writing a new rule about removal after the fact. Officially the alliance member needs to consent to removal to leave.

I mean, if it's literally unanimous, then they totally can dump Turkey; they'd just need to agree to all leave NATO and make a new organisation that is literally copypasted NATO except Turkey doesn't get admitted.

Being able to almost singlehandedly block in Russian access in and out of the Black Sea (the only alternative is the Volga-Don canal) is incredibly valuable, and probably the main reason we put up with their shenanigans.

(the only alternative is the Volga-Don canal)

Wrong canal. You're thinking of the Volga-Baltic Waterway and White Sea-Baltic Canal, which together allow Russia to move stuff from the Black Sea to the Baltic or White Seas (the latter of which gives uninterdictable ocean access). The Volga-Don Canal connects the Black and Caspian Seas, but that's of much more limited value since the Caspian Sea is a lake.

No, you still need to traverse the Volga-Don canal to get to the Volga and those other canals (and eventually the Baltic or Arctic) because the Don empties into the Sea of Azov/Black Sea, while the Volga empties into the Caspian.

Whoops, got them mixed up. Apologies.

Seems not that valuable to me given that we have complete air superiority in the Mediterranean. Time to make Turkey pay their freight. Threaten to kick them out and they might actually act like valuable alliance members and not an embarrassment.

Per the Montreux convention, Turkey gets to block warships of warring parties without itself being a party to the war. If the US had to apply its Mediterranean air superiority to prevent Russia from reinforcing the BSF, they would have to (threaten to) directly fire on the Russians, which would let the Russians feel like they have license to shoot down US drones over the Black Sea, which would still be very detrimental to UA. Any attempt to claim that a naval blockade in international waters is not in fact an act of war would bite the US in the ass over Taiwan, as China could start that one sooner than the US argument could be memoryholed.


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