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The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well. It is the good old trope of getting your three wishes but each wish comes with a giant caveat.
They wished for ended discrimination against Asians in college admissions and didn't get increased odds of whites being accepted.
They complained about migrant crime and got dorky Indians instead of Guatemalans.
They complained more about migrant crime and got a society in which cops look like soldiers.
They complained about muslim terrorism and got a surveillance state that rivals stasi.
They complained about muslim terrorism but instead of getting an immigration ban after 9/11 they got tens of thousands of largely right wing voters killed/seriously injured fighting wars in the middle east that caused a migrant crisis and effectively ethnically cleansed Christian populations. Their "clash of civilizations" ended with the US supporting Al Qaeda in Syria and opening the flood gates to Europe by bombing Libya.
The migrants are living on welfare they complained. So they got a migrant with a job.
If you can't even state your own self interest how on Earth do you expect to win anything?
I don't think this is a terribly accurate view, because this implies that if they simply formulated their concerns properly they could be addressed - and this just isn't the case here. The problems which they were complaining about are the negative externalities of policies which the wealthy donors and power elite who actually run western governments enthusiastically support and profit from. There was no way in which they could correctly word or formulate their desire for lower amounts of migration, because the people in charge of executing that policy had no intention of actually fixing the problems they were complaining about.
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Do you think American conservatives, even the non-ideological MAGA kind, find this to be a problem?
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It literally comes down to immigration. Bad faith posters will argue that H1B immigration is “legal” and therefor not the problem, but theyre deliberately missing the fact that the problem is H1B visa abuse, which is technically legal, but practically identical to the type of illegal immigration wr see from Guatemala and Mexico.
How is it being abused? I'm not aware that any significant number of applicants are being approved who aren't in compliance with the statutory language. To wit:
I get the impression from some of the comments here that some may interpret this as being for the kinds of highly specialized work where you might not be able to find someone available to do in America and thus need to look abroad. Abuse, then, would be hiring H-1Bs for run-of-the-mill coding work for which American universities graduate thousands each year. The problem with this argument is there's nothing in the law supporting it. The way I'd interpret "specialized knowledge" as an attorney is as knowledge distinct from general knowledge, i.e., not the kind of knowledge the average person would have, even the average educated person. Knowing how to code may not be the rarest skill, but it's not so common that the average person can be hired to do it with no experience and be productive in a few weeks. If you're hiring someone with a bachelor's in computer science to do the job, then you've met the requirement.
The illegality is in that many H1B positions are never actually open to American applicants. Particularly in tech a lot of the H1B positions appear to be subcontracted to what are the equivalent of "diploma mills" except for visas.
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Well for one thing, as far as I'm aware the law requires companies to post positions and get no applicants before they can get a visa. But I have seen, with my own eyes, when such a "posting" was literally placed on the side of the break room fridge that was 1" away from the wall. While that may comply with the letter of the law, it seems to me to be a clear abuse.
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You've missed the point of all those genie stories if you think that. No one can formulate their wishes well enough to get what they want without worse side-effects; the genie is powerful and hostile.
Comedy skit about that:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lM0teS7PFMo?si=GyB-7F1nMDamSbe4
One of my favorite parts:
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It almost makes you wonder if the genie stories were political commentary to begin with.
Doubt it. Putting aside "The Monkey's Paw" which features a hostile (cursed) wish-granter but no genies, all the original genie stories like Aladdin feature a genie which is powerful and / or hostile* but if it agrees to grant wishes it does so in a sensible manner. The idea that a godlike being would vent its wrath by being really passive-aggressive is an entirely modern invention.
(Add in the possibility that the popularity of modern genie stories comes from dealing with modern power structures and that is political commentary haha).
*Sometimes the genie grants wishes for letting it out of a bottle, sometimes the genie threatens to kill people and so they have to trick it into a bottle.
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In a similar vein:
UK voters: we want less immigration.
Boris Johnson: you want less Eastern Europeans? Heard you loud and clear! A million non-EU immigrants a year coming right up!
American conservatives: we're sick of the wokeness in universities.
Politicians: we will clear out protesters against Israel's atrocities immediately.
Most American conservatives like Israel. Certainly conservatives like Israel more than leftists do. This is a wish done as requested, not a wish twisted.
There's a huge age confounder afaik. Boomers do, because they have been propagandized for decades.
No? Because openly agitating against whites, males, conservatives is still acceptable? At best it's less perverse than the Boris Johnson case.
The people agitating against Israel and the people agitating against white males and red tribers(campus activists don’t seem to care very much about the actual beliefs of these people) are, in a lot of cases, quite literally the same people. They got the hammer dropped on them for one over the other, sure, but it did manage to bring quite a number of university admins more in line with the government’s demands that they stop giving in to grievance crap- in my own state UT has dialed back the grievance crap in response to state police wrecking Israel protesters’ shit to an extent that A&M(no anti-israel protests of note) is now the worst offender on grievance issues, because they didn’t offer that particular weapon to the state.
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Both Vote Leave (Cummings, with Johnson as figurehead) and Leave.EU (Farage) made blaming the EU for specifically Muslim immigration a crucial part of their message. Cummings continues to insist (plausibly, given how close things were) that the Brexit referendum could not have been won without the "Turkey is joining the EU and then millions of Turks will come to the UK" lie. Cummings was also quite frank (on his blog during the period where he was out of UK politics) that "Get rid of the Eastern Europeans", while popular with core Brexit supporters, would have been a losing message with swing voters.
The debate between "near-zero immigration" and "continued mass migration but managed competently in the interests of the existing population" (at least in the UK, described as a "Canadian or Australian-style points system") is an intra-right one, not a battle for the median voter. From the point of view of the median voter, the immigration issue is closer to "nobody is illegal open borders extremists should be kicked out of the Overton window yesterday".
Can you clarify? If ever a sentence needed punctuation...
"nobody is illegal, open borders, extremists should be kicked out"
or
"nobody-is-illegal-open-borders extremists should be kicked out"
AFAIK the current level of immigration is very unpopular with the median voter, and it regularly comes high in people's concerns, but in that irritating British way they don't like politicians saying anything about it or doing anything about it, they just want the problem to go away. Which frankly we could do by issuing fewer visas.
What I mean is that the noisy left sound like they support open borders, and that it sure looks to the average man-in-the-street (certainly in the UK, the US, and most of Western Europe, though not as far as I can see in Australia, or Canada before Trudeau fucked things up) as though the current immigration policy is de facto open borders through deliberately ineffective enforcement.
The median voter does not support open borders, either de facto or de jure, and so the immigration debate when both sides are talking to the median voter is about trying to credibly claim not to support the status quo. The actual substance of a sane immigration policy is less relevant. Telling people that you want to kick out their immigrant friends/colleagues generally goes down like a lead balloon with people who are close to the median voter on the left/right axis.
I don't think the median voter understands immigration numbers. If you focus-group the question of which legal immigrants we should kick out, the answer you get in the UK is basically "violent Muslims" and not much else. Dominic Cummings says that moving to an Australian/Canadian points system (which would not mean a large drop in overall numbers) is hugely popular in the UK. There are definitely people who don't like using European immigrants for seasonal agricultural labour, but they are closer to the typical Tory/Reform switcher than to the median voter. (Before mass immigration, Ireland was poor enough that the Irish did a lot of migrant work in the UK, and they don't really count as foreign.)
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I'm unclear about this last sentence. Are you suggesting that the political class could do something about it, but the public doesn't want them to?
Because as you say, the politicians could easily reduce immigration by issuing fewer visas, but there seems to be a post-Blair consense that more immigration = more economic growth (a lie that was put to bed by the Boriswave, or indeed the entire post-2008 economic stagnation).
I am suggesting that a big chunk of the public (20%? 30%?) wants less immigration AND will react negatively to any politician who says that immigration should be lower, or to newspaper headlines showing active attempts to dissuade immigration. They want immigration to go down quietly and out of sight, whilst retaining the moral high-ground by never supporting anyone who comes across as anti-immigration.
There is a decent chunk of hardcore lower-immigration voters who don't care, but they don't form a voting majority without the high-ground chunk. And the pro-immigration groups can therefore force anti-immigration politicians to back down by putting them into a position where they either have to abandon attempts to reduce immigration or defend them in public.
In a UK context, I haven't seen this argument in the wild since 2014 or so. I don't remember it featuring in Remainer discourse - they focused on the loss of UK opportunities to work abroad and avoided the topic of incoming immigration because it was an obvious vote loser. And as you say, seeing salaries plummet during the Boriswave and soar during Covid quarantine made it really impossible to defend.
It was pretty much what the Boris/Sunak governments believed privately, if not publicly. Sunak himself thought that if illegal immigration was under control, then the public didn't care what happened to legal migration. The assumption was that a massive increase in legal migration would supercharge tax revenues, reduce inflation (by suppressing wage growth) and give the Tories the best chance at winning the next election.
What they didn't realise is that non-European workers aren't nearly as productive as European workers unless they are heavily selected, which they weren't. Dependents are also unproductive. It was a completely unforced error.
What I found illuminating about this was that it really showed that even center-right to right-wing politicians mostly don't believe there are any actual group-level differences in ability to contribute productively in a highly developed economy. I think on some level I had assumed they recognised it but didn't acknowledge it publicly (for obvious reasons) but no, it seems they really did think that people from vastly different populations were all interchangable.
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The actual story is slightly more complex than that. The dumb rules the Tories passed mean that the OBR has a lot of implicit power, and the treasury’s “projections” showed that immigration was necessary for GDP / tax revenue growth sufficient for planned borrowing not to freak out markets. That was coupled with the fact that 80%+ of Tory MPs, even on the socially conservative Rees Moggian wing of the party, didn’t care at all about immigration. That left Patel and Braverman relatively isolated. Boris himself didn’t care about immigration, and Sunak doesn’t really care about anything, but they alone aren’t responsible more than the party at large.
Yes I was considering talking about the OBR rules, with their explicit assumptions that all immigrants are going to be as productive as natives and the fact that they don't take long term tax and spending into account. All in all a profound failure of the political class, especially since the Boris-wave will all have been granted indefinite leave to remain before the end of the Starmer government. Permanently impoverishing the country for...nothing.
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That's true. I read them as being more concerned with avoiding potential economic catastrophe by cutting off the flow than actively believing that they could supercharge the economy by increasing it. The Singapore-on-Thames people were more willing to propose immigration up == economy up, but even then they usually talked about skilled migrants. Plus the internalised cringe that kicks in whenever a well-educated Brit tries to publicly or privately debate whether immigration is a good idea.
IMO this combination of cringe + PR + risk avoidance would explain why they continued the policy for so long and didn't implement selection or block dependents. But you may well be right.
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Turkey being accepted into the EU seemed like a real possibility before Erdogan went all strongman, so was it really a lie at the time of Brexit?
No, it wasn't. There was no way in 2016 that someone could credibly claim that Turkey had zero percent chance of EU admission within, say, the next 15 years.
I'll go further.
Brexit only "failed" because post-Brexit politicians in Britain made all the same mistakes as their EU counterparts : mass immigration, heavy-handed regulation, anti-speech tyranny, etc...
Brexit was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the revival of the British nation.
Despite everything, the UK is better off due to Brexit because it makes reform possible. Things can sometimes pivot quickly, and maybe within 5 years the reform party can take power and lead the country to a better path. But it would be a lot tougher with the EU barring the way.
Almost no reform was genuinely blocked by EU membership. Even stuff like mandatory ECHR membership doesn’t matter, because other member states routinely ignore rulings with impunity. The UK would never have been serious punished by the EU executive because there are always at least 2-4 other countries angry at Brussels for whatever reason. It was completely pointless and achieved nothing other than hugely accelerating mass immigration from the third world for no reason.
True, politicians could have worked around the EU if they wanted to, but they didn’t want to. Thus the performative shock when anyone suggests ignoring the EHRC.
Leaving the EU was necessary not because it gave politicians more power, but because it removed their biggest excuse for not using the power that they had.
(That, and avoiding Ever Closer Union. The EU as it was in 2016 was a moving target, explicitly focused on making it ever harder to leave. It felt very much like a now-or-never moment.)
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This was, and is, basically my attitude. The government drastically underperformed my expectations but even so, it’s GOT to be a good thing that they can no longer hide behind “the EU says we can’t do that”.
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I missed the part where politicians have to implement the voter's wishes as long as they're formulated correctly. For that matter, I even missed the part where voters even get to formulate wishes, rather than politicians making promises that they later refuse to keep.
Is there any research on the performance of subsequent cohorts of politicians when their predecessors were hanged or guillotined for poor performance?
I doubt that that has ever happened, given that tapestries are seldom elected to high office. Hanged, on the other hand....
Thank you for sending me down a bit of a rabbit hole, I've fixed it.
Though I now believe their effigies should be hung, not hanged.
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He just talkin' bout big dicked losers, fam.
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The problem is that this depends on reliably appointing someone trustworthy and competent to a position of extreme power, at which point you could just use that mechanism to appoint officials.
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"In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others."
The performance of the Royal Navy did improve after Admiral Byng was shot. I remember reading an academic article making the argument that this was causal - that the knowledge that you would have to fight even against the odds changed the way that captains trained their crews and planned engagements. One difference the article pointed out was that British doctrine favoured engaging from upwind (which gives you superior mobility and allows you to determine the pace of the engagement) whereas French doctrine favoured engaging from downwind (which gives you better chances of successfully running away if that is what you later decide to do).
There is also the point that shooting Admiral Byng made harsh naval discipline a lot more tolerable to the men who suffered it.
"Nothing is so good for the morale of the troops as occasionally to see a dead general".
Field Marshal Slim
"It makes no difference which side the general is on".
Unknown British Soldier
"Never Excuse as Stupidity" by @KulakRevolt?
I don’t mind his brand of midwit autism, but it is always surprising to me that his poor writing and lukewarm NrX observations have garnered 15,000 substack subscribers. Good for him.
And here I thought I was alone. He's long on chest thumping rhetoric and cherry picking and short on defensible positions. I wasn't impressed with his writing when he posted here (although I often share his feelings), so I'm confused about his substack success. The "catgirl" shtick is IMO distasteful, but reading his comments a while back, there are at least a handful of folks who think he's really that OF girl in his profile pic, so that probably helps. Anyway, "don't hate the playa, hate the game" as they say.
He says spicy shit while occasionally having a point and he's good at twitter. I can't personally read his long form writing but it doesn't shock me that some can.
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He described his Twitter technique once. Basically:
In short, lure in your opponents by looking weak, then muller them by actually being strong. You score by getting lots of attention for your theory, and you score again by successfully overcoming challengers.
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No - it was an academic journal article. But based on the free intro, Kulak is making the same point.
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It's an interesting situation. On the one hand, I can see that being absolutely correct. On the other, my reading of Admiral Byng's court-martial is that he was absolutely hung out to dry for political reasons. Which makes for an interesting social/moral dilemma: if you were involved in the process back then, and knew (or had an idea of) the beneficial effects it would have on the future navy, would you choose to have an innocent man executed?
I often wonder this about the justice system in general: if it means placating the mob, is it sometimes worth committing an act of injustice to a single individual?
The Ones Who Walk Away From Rittenhouse
More seriously, I think the general framing of this question—not mob placation necessarily, but “good” consequences as a potential reason to bend or break the rules—gets at the heart of act-utilitarianism vs. rule-utilitarianism, as well as deontology and other ethical schools. As for my opinion on the matter, fiat iustitia ruat cælum
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