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orthoxerox
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7m ago
This article annoyed me, because Freddie has had two non-fiction books published by major American publishers, routinely flexes about how many prestige publications he's been published in, and has mentioned on several occasions that his combined annual Substack and freelancing revenue is in the $250k range - and then he has the nerve to turn around and say that he's "never been in the position" to say that he's successful and he knows it?
The difference between him and someone he considers "successful" is that he can't stop. Elon Musk, Carlos Tavares, or even Taylor Swift can wake up tomorrow and say to their reflection in the mirror, "you know what, fuck that, I want to switch to goose farming" and do just that. Their families will not be harmed by this choice, but de Boer must constantly tread water to earn his $250k. He might decide he doesn't want to work that hard and scale down his earnings to just $125k, but he can't just stop writing, he's not a capitalist.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10m ago
I feel like this is going to be biased toward declaring groups that get along to be "homogeneous", and those that don't are subdivided into smaller groups until they do, with the broader discording factions declared "heterogeneous". You could divide the English into Anglos, Saxons, Normans, and so on, but they still mostly get along so you'll call them all "English".
Supah_Schmendrick
10m ago
This is extremely inaccurate. Lebanon is famously split between feuding Sunni, Shia, and Maronite christian groups to the degree that their constitution sets ethnic quotas for power-sharing. Afghan is also split between many warring tribal-ethnic groups as well, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10m ago
If anything, the growing disdain with the policies of the Trudeau administration is revealing that when push comes to shove, and white progressives are asked to make material sacrifices to uphold and stick to their principles, they immediately step down from their high pulpit of moral superiority and inclusivity. There is no free lunch, and this is what it takes to ensure that marginalized groups can also get a slice of the pie; you cannot have your cake and eat it too by simultaneously demanding material equity and then crying when those same materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour. This is the exact dynamic Liam Kofi Bright outlines in the previously linked paper, "White Psychodrama." White progressives should either put up, grin and bear the cost of the very same social justice they demanded through bloody cancellation and mob invective, or end the charade and shut the fuck up.
What I suspect in this case is something like what’s happening in the USA. The elites want the immigrants to drive up costs of goods (increased population leading to increased demand) and to hold down wages. This is how immigrants tend to improve the economy of the country they go to. On the one hand, as new arrivals, they’d need housing, and all the stuff that comes with it. They will need furniture, vehicles, clothes, shoes, kids need school supplies etc. probably toys. So the price of these things go up because suddenly you have doubled the size of the town and thus driven up demand. At the same time, their expectations for wages are dirt cheap— and this delights the business owners who can now bid down the cost of labor (and BONUS! Get points for your work to increase diversity) and even skimp on safety and health rules as third world countries have poor conditions and the workers aren’t going to complain about treatment that while bad by first world standards is wonderful for people used to poor conditions at the workplace. OSHA (and the Canadian equivalent) don’t exist in most developing countries.
So the benefits are the support depends very much on which side of the class divide you sit on. If you’re part of the investment class, immigration is net positive. The stocks will go up, GDP goes up, labor becomes cheaper and more compliant. If your on the working class side, your wages stagnate, your costs go up, your kids are denied opportunities for work (to make room for the cheaper and more compliant immigrant population who won’t complain or ask for raises) their schools spend more effort to teach immigrants English than getting your kids prepared for life after high school.
And there is the reason for the lack of support. It’s a battle between the beneficiary class who wants all these immigrants and the benefits they offer to their social class, vs the working class that all of this is happening too. They don’t like that their wages aren’t going up, or that the new immigrants are allowing dirty and dangerous conditions on the job. They don’t like the resources that should be going to the school computer lab instead being shunted to hiring scores of ESL teachers and textbooks written in whatever language the kids speak.
This sounds more like an indictment of young Canadians, their lack of skills, and their inability to compete in the marketplace with those who will do their exact same entry-level service job, except for lower pay, and for longer hours. Immigrants are hard-working, ambitious, and (possibly even literally) hungry for success. Their lack of access to said opportunities instills within them a greater work ethic and drive to succeed when they don't have the Bank of White Mummy and Daddy to catch them when they fall after their six-year all expenses paid academic career in Theatrical Non-Binary Basket Weaving fails to take off. Why should white Canadians feel that their white privilege of being born in a deeply racist country entitles them to continue upholding the institutions of racism by denying ethnic minorities a job that they can do just as well as a white? What entitles these already privileged whites to a job over minorities?
I think you have a wildly skewed idea of the kinds of people who live in small towns. These people don’t have the resources you think they do. They’re mostly working class. The immigrants are not taking the jobs of high skilled graduates, they’re taking jobs from the working class. And working class people don’t actually have the bank of dad to fall back on. So when they don’t get early work experience it’s an economic setback. Further, these people might be trying to support a family. The advantage immigrants have is that they’re cheap and compliant. They might work a bit harder, but the main thing is that they won’t ewww try to get better wages or conditions. They’ll work for peanuts and sleep 3-4 families to a house so they can live on $10 an hour. No first world labor can afford to work for that little, but now that we have immigrants, you can forget about your wages going up. But remember, if you’re not in favor of being underbid by imported labor, you’re a white privileged racist.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14m ago
I mean that’s just not remotely accurate. Lebanon has several religious groups who have been in open conflict many times over its history. Maronite Christians, Orthodox Christians, both Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, Alawites, and that’s to say nothing of the masses of refugees from the Syrian conflict currently residing within its borders.
Afghanistan, meanwhile, has always been an incredibly ethnically diverse and fractious region. Pashtun, Balochs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazara, plus all kinds of obscure insular groups that still practice otherwise dead religious traditions, or who credibly claim direct descent from Alexander the Great’s wars against the Parthians a few thousand years ago.
Like, you’ve picked two of the least homogenous countries in the entire region.
Blueberry
18m ago
but dysgenic IQ selection from low fertility rates is not a real thing
Can you give a summary?
Yeah, I had a similar experience to you going back home last month and finding out the old hairdressing place I went to as a kid is now all Indians. And the grocery store I went to as a kid is all Indians. Etc. etc. I live in a very diverse part of Toronto so it's not like I'm easily shocked or whatever. Hell, even in my neighbourhood we're a lot different than three years ago, because the Filipinos and Chinese and African immigrants have been shunted out by Indians too. My brother-in-law who lived in Toronto for a decade was very surprised when he came back this year, and remarked how Toronto feels so much less diverse now that Indians are forming a new pseudo-majority in many neighbourhoods or employment sectors.
In my personal life I engage with a lot of well-off Torontonians, the type who have historically been among the most pro-Liberal (capital L) and pro-immigration. They have up until recently been insulated from the effects of immigration while benefiting enormously from higher property values and depressed wages. It's finally creeping up on them too: it's car thefts and the fact that their kids (like high-school, university age) can't get jobs. There are no typical student jobs left anymore. McDonalds? Grocery store? Retail? Forget it. There are a dozen people from Punjab for every Canadian kid, and they will put up with a lot more shit. These well-off Canadians are finally starting to realize they've created a country that is hostile to their children.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
20m ago
As someone who once unwittingly had all his car radio stations tuned to country FM stations, I am surprised that more of The Motte hasn't embraced its "be like my elders: buy some land, marry someone you love, raise some hell, then some kids, and go to church" aesthetic.
As for me, I would describe it like root beer: "insidious, just like The Federation".
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
22m ago
Lebanon and Afghanistan are pretty homogenous as well.
johnfabian
23m ago
Yes, but Sicilian/pan pizzas are very easy at home with no specialist equipment
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
25m ago
On the topic of going Dutch on dates, I don't know if the norms are different in India or if I had better luck than usual, but I'm pretty sure that's how I did it for the overwhelming majority of dates. I can think of only one date where she outright asked me to pay, and I would consider that a "vetting" date, because afterwards she offered to go Dutch. All the steady relationships I've had, we've split bills or at least alternated paying.
Personally, I'd be rather annoyed if someone expected me to foot the bill. I could potentially see myself doing it if there was a massive gulf between incomes, for example if they were a broke college student, but that would very much be the exception, not the norm. I'd consider someone who never veered from that approach tantamount to a gold digger, and give them the cold shoulder ASAP. I've never felt the need to impress women by flaunting my wealth either. Anyone who resorts to doing that loses esteem in my eyes.
No_one
26m ago
It isn't clear we need superhumanly good data.
It is.
Humans can make novel discoveries if they have a sufficiently good understanding of existing data and sufficiently good mental horsepower to use that data
LLMs and similar systems aren't human, not in the slightest.
It seems like we just need to get an AI to approximately Von Neumann level
They're nowhere near that. People are happy they can count letters correctly.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
27m ago
She needs a man who will actually support her, and that is generally a man who seeks her out.
This is not true at all. There are a lot of men who are good men and are going to support their woman, but aren't mind readers who can magically tell that a woman's statement of friendship was actually meant to be taken as a statement of romantic desire. If anything, choosing men who read into things is going to select against getting decent men, because jerks are more likely to not care about the woman's intent and just go for it.
Highlandclearances
28m ago
I think the pre-2015 immigration consensus was only partly to do with selectivity. The numbers were still high, but they went overwhelmingly to large cities that were already multicultural— especially their large suburbs. It was possible to live in Canada from 2000 to 2015 say and not perceive the rapid changes because they were occurring in Brampton. And critically, because they were so concentrated and numbers not insane, housing could respond. As recently as 2015, housing outside of the top 3 metros wasn’t just affordable it was cheap.
Now it’s everywhere. Every small town. Every neighborhood.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
30m ago
meanwhile honorary white Japan (which was spared colonialism - somehow)
When the threat of colonization became apparent, they built themselves up into a modern state.
Which itself is a rather good refutation of the nonsense theories about how the plight of the Third World is all due to the First World, but you'll never get anyone who believes it to change their mind.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
37m ago
Is the woman saying this while batting their eyes? Acting bashful or coy? Are her hands clasped behind her or is she leaning forward? She might actually want you to flirt back. But that doesn't mean she would accept a proposition. She might want a proposition, to stroke her ego, but she wouldn't accept it.
It's about posture and context. "I would like to spend more time alone with you" is way different from "I'm glad you were the one assigned to this task" or "I like to hang out with our group of friends, of which you are one." It's the woman's job to figure out how to get across "I would like to spend more time alone with you" without crossing the line of plausible deniability (because if she has to throw herself at a man, he's probably not invested in her.)
Is it fair that it's this way? Women have the more vulnerable role in continuing the species. She needs a man who will actually support her, and that is generally a man who seeks her out.
johnfabian
39m ago
So people are responding with action which is great to see, but politically this is going to be the greatest ever repudiation of the left in Canada. The conservatives are polling at 47% among the young.
It will be interesting to see what the Conservatives actually do if (when) they form government. So far Poilievre has only offered the vaguest commitments to reducing inflow (saying things like he will "match immigration to rate of homebuilding").
The Conservative Party has historically been reliant on industries that take advantage of TFWs/international students. Almost half their MPs are landlords. They don't really want to slow this down anymore than the Liberals do. The swing of the youth vote towards them is in large part predicated on anti-immigration sentiment, so how do they reconcile this?
Luckily for them the Liberals have given them so much room to maneuver this is less of threading the needle and more finding your way out of an open door. Even cutting the inflow by half would leave them at roughly double the rate of the Harper years.
TequilaMockingbird
40m ago
Wish us luck against the lesser birds ;-)
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
44m ago
I agree that it's bad to put women on a pedestal. But that doesn't mean that the extreme cynicism of PUA thought is the right answer either. The key is to not put women on a pedestal while still treating them with respect and not turning it into some game.
I said it was simple, not that you would find it credible. But that's the argument.
You start giving counter-examples and you'll hear about Haiti's reparations, slaves building America, coups in LatAm, India had X% of the world's GDP before Britain looted it, bad borders in Africa and the ME, sanctions against Zimbabwe meanwhile honorary white Japan (which was spared colonialism - somehow) was needed as a bulwark against the Soviets and so was treated relatively well. They have explanations, it's just a matter of how much you think they're cope (I've swung over to the "cope" side but I change most of my opinions an average of every eight years and I'm in the "converted zealot" stage and it's really not helpful for digging out nuance.)
It may not hold up but it's the closest thing to a coherent justification for the asymmetry I've seen.
You asked for some theory that would allow one and not the other, not just an explanation of nakedly self-serving behavior. I doubt anyone needs to hear "my opponents want me to believe things that help them and to avoid things that don't" from me.
johnfabian
49m ago
It would be wrong to break down the way Canadian politics operates with respect to immigration as a conservative/liberal split. It is more coherently a young vs old dynamic, and somewhat even more pointedly people who own property vs people who don't.
Up until very recently there was a very strong national pro-immigration consensus across pretty much the entire political spectrum and all demographics, with the one exception being a fringe national party (People's Party). Canada was by a decent margin the most welcoming country to new immigrants and perceptions of the immigration system in general were strongly favourable. This was I think in part a reflection that the system itself was well-designed: priority to well-off, educated immigrants who spoke either national language.
The capital "I" immigration rate has gone up, but people don't really have a problem with this. More concerning to Canadians has been the growth in other types of migrants: international students, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers/refugees. It's these categories that have driven the massive increases in population. For example in 2023 the breakdown was 477k new immigrants (i.e., foreign nationals offered permanent residence) and ~ 1.3 million "temporary" residents.
While the federal Liberals have certainly enabled and to a large part driven the abuse of these other flows of migration, they have not been the only bad actors. Provincial conservative-run governments have absolutely followed them in this race to rebuild Punjab in Canada. Together they have in the course of about two years absolutely destroyed the national consensus on immigration.
SophisticatedHillbilly
53m ago
True. It was always unclear to me whether this worked for the whole food or included each component. I assumed the former (in the sense that after applied to spinach casserole, they will be fine with spinach casserole, but not with spinach by itself.) It’s not really applicable to when a kid just doesn’t like a particular food (in the case of spinach they might just have have really high taste sensitivity to bitterness) but specifically for the “will literally just eat one food and nothing else, potentially up to starvation if they don’t get french fries” type of kid
Also I understand not wanting to do this. Most people don’t like eating the same things repeatedly. I am not one of those people (my desire to eat a food grows ~linearly with the number of times in a row I’ve consumed it) but I wouldn’t blame anyone for not applying this info.
Highlandclearances
54m ago
I mean I’m probably claiming too much, but it looks to me like ethnic homogeneity is a better predictor than income for happiness.
Highlandclearances
56m ago
Oof.
I mean I suspected he was a troll at first, but it was so elaborate complete with the nonsensical woke sociology links.
No, you still need to traverse the Volga-Don canal to get to the Volga and those other canals (and eventually the Baltic or Arctic) because the Don empties into the Sea of Azov/Black Sea, while the Volga empties into the Caspian.
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