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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   33164 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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If it helps, I'm Canadian, and the Indians we get are not considered to be very hard workers.

https://www.indiatoday.in/world/indians-abroad/story/indian-origin-canada-td-bank-free-food-data-scientist-video-fired-students-food-bank-university-2531178-2024-04-24

I'm not gonna lie, that sounds like a skill issue on the part of the canadian culture and government. I mean, it definitely confirms my priors to hear about canadians failing at things because I'm convinced that you're a fake country, to the point where it's the one thing I agree with donald trump on. (That and the need to annex greenland and panama). But anglophones have been successfully exploiting immigrant labor for literally a thousand years. Fix your shit, canada, or we'll come in and fix it for you.

I'm being a little facetious here. Not entirely facetious, but I can see how america is vulnerable to similar attacks. That being said, the very article you linked is an example of a culture successfully punishing someone who's violated a social norm. I know you're making a point along the lines of, "this is the one we caught-- just think about all the other fish out there!" But my response is still going to be, "then make a better net instead of nuking the pond."

I don't disagree with you in that it is definitely a skill issue; I just don't trust a government to ever do better.

Since when does anglophone society have any tradition of immigrant labour whatsoever? Britain had no significant (relative to population) immigration until the latter half of the 1900s, which coincided with our total collapse as a world power. Australia and NZ didn't have immigration until the same period, they just had transfers from the homeland. And America's endless racial struggle with the black labourers they imported and then the Ellis Islanders and the resultant machine politics forms a cautionary tale for the rest of the world. Canada I'm not sure about.

(Colonising foreign countries is not the same thing, and doesn't produce the same issues, since you don't have to interact with your labourers and their native taskmasters except to extract money and resources from them.)

Since when does anglophone society have any tradition of immigrant labour whatsoever? Britain had no significant (relative to population) immigration until the latter half of the 1900s, which coincided with our total collapse as a world power.

If you don't count Irish workers in the mainland as immigrants, this turns into an argument about the definition of "significant" (Hugenots were something like 2% of the population of England in 1700, more in London) - clearly the immigrant percentage now is an order of magnitude higher than any of the precedents wokists love to point to. But if we arguing about the social consequences of immigration, I don't see why the Irish don't count. They had a wildly unpopular foreign religion that made them hard to assimilate, were generally considered to be prone to drunkenness and criminality, and were openly and notoriously used by employers to bid down wages.

I wasn’t deliberately excluding them, the thought never crossed my mind. With apologies to our Irish posters, I think of Britain as ‘two islands north of the Channel’. It would be like thinking of Lancastrians as immigrants. I also didn’t think that many of them crossed over - presumably like English peasants, they mostly stayed put?

I was thinking of the Hugenots as being the only real precedent, and as you say the movement was much smaller.

Food for thought.

Canada I'm not sure about.

Canada’s population was 10% of Ukrainian descent before the recent immigration wave. They definitely had mass immigration before the iron curtain.

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