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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Not by choice.

There are places with weaker and stronger governments on the earth and generally people do not move from places with stronger governments to places with weaker governments.

and generally people do not move from places with stronger governments to places with weaker governments.

Which is why Chinese immigration is constantly overwhelmed with applicants while basically nobody bothers trying to come to the US.

No, "strong" and "weak" are doing a whole lot of heavy lifting and also don't evenly distribute across populations. One could argue that the South African state, and a significant cross-section of its citizens, form a significantly "stronger" oppressive government bloc from the perspective of a smaller fraction of citizens who have enough time preference to prefer electricity tomorrow over the maintenance costs of that infrastructure today than can be found in any other Western nation, whose governments (and supporting citizenry) are much weaker in that regard.

Those citizens are all emigrating to countries with "weaker" governments in the sense that that government is either unwilling or unable to enforce similar terms- in essence, the taxes are lower. Sure, the (example) Australian government and people are very awful in a number of other ways, but until they start shutting the power off every night because muh carbon or fail to enforce law and order because muh racism (the latter is still a thing in any US-aligned nation, but to a much smaller degree than it is in SA), they're better masters than their fellow South Africans (and their government) would be, hence their migration.

lol, lmao even.

I guess it's easy to argue for anything when one ignores all the parts of history that don't fit it. But I somehow am not convinced that exit from overbearing centralized governments is something that doesn't deserve consideration because you personally don't consider it "general" enough.

I'm sorry but I just find it ridiculous to argue that fleeing conscription and taxes isn't a common reason for migration throughout history. People have been doing it ever since either were invented.

The problem of the White Russians wasn't that the emerging Bolshevik state was strong -- actually it was significantly weaker at the time than any of the countries to which the émigrés went -- it's that it was Bolshevik. The US government was much stronger than the Soviet government, despite being less overbearing.

that fleeing conscription and taxes isn't a common reason for migration throughout history.

The US does not have conscription, while countries with significantly weaker governments like Syria or Ukraine do.

If you look a few comments up the chain, conscription and taxes are what we're talking about, not some abstract notion of strength you can argue to mean anything.

I started this comment chain and the comment I was replying to said nothing about conscription or taxes. I think "is there conscription and high taxes" is a bad measure of government strength compared to "does this government face any serious threats to its monopoly on force."

Then I think the entire disagreement is down to the definition of strength.

Centralization and the prevalence of rebels are pretty orthogonal.

I don't see how this could be true. A decentralized state which leaves more power in the hands of regional/local authorities provides many more opportunities for rebel groups to emerge and organize.

Oh that's easy.

Federal and confederal states allow local customs and forms to change independently without requiring a power struggle.

Central governments can also breed rebellion because their distance both in hierarchy and geography affords them less legitimacy and they have to use force more often.

Hence the two common and proven ways of dealing with separatism: autonomy and repression.

Both unitarian and federal states can be stable or unstable, but both have longstanding examples of both.

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