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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Pro-DEI, high taxes, mass immigration, affirmative action but anti-Israel, or the inverse? (If you say ‘we’re getting both anyway’, that wasn’t the question).

My first priority is “White population doesn’t go down + they aren’t discriminated against”. My second priority is that Israel doesn’t exert undue influence on us, and instead we exert it on them. But if Trump continues to be so comically submissive to them I will temporarily flip my priorities around. Also, new information I’ve learned on the Mennonite birth rates in South America make me care a little less about White TFR (eg in this century they will make up most births in Bolivia).

My first priority is “White population doesn’t go down + they aren’t discriminated against”.

Can you expand on this?

What is there to expand that you haven’t already read on the forum? The White share in the countries they founded is trending downward rapidly. I don’t want it to, which is justified by personal taste, the science of evolution, and the evidence that countries are better with more of these people in it. Also, I don’t want people of White ancestry discriminated against in institutions or in the origin stories foisted upon them in education. This means that a middle class white person will never have a position taken by a wealthier minority person of similar ability due to diversity, and it means that there is nothing negative taught about White people in school which isn’t counterbalanced by negative stories about minorities. When these primary things are met, which are upstream of most of the things I care about, then I have the luxury to care about the more trivial matters of the economy and geopolitical reach.

Mennonite birth rates in South America make me care a little less about White TFR (eg in this century they will make up most births in Bolivia).

Too early to tell. It might be that the modern malady is simply taking a little longer to catch up to them. Of course I hope it doesn't.

Not sure if it’s too early to tell, really — it’s consistently high, provided there’s available farmland. What definitely is too early to tell, however, is whether the Amish or Mennonite who leave agriculture will continue to have a high birth rate. Or maybe there’s already a study on that which I need to read.

The not-particularly-strict Mennonites that I know seem to maintain the same sort of lifestyle when they start construction or other businesses -- I'm pretty sure it's mostly the church and community support. Whether they can maintain this is another story -- I don't really know any "urban Mennonites", or if that's even a thing.

Yeah - you obviously aren't going to maintain Western Civilisation with Old Order Amish. Whether or not you can maintain it with car-driving Mennonites is an open question, but the odds don't look good. David Friedmann's account of Amish "law" in Legal Systems Very Different from our Own was that Amish minimise trust-requiring interactions with other Amish under a different Ordnung, let alone the English. If the same is true of Mennonites more broadly, then they aren't going to be building a 5nm fab any time soon.