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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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.