“Most of their inhabitants are innocent. They’re victims of their country’s evil minorities". They may also be victims of their often barbaric religions and dysfunctional cultures, which you conveniently ignore. Unfortunately, they take these with them when they emigrate.
Even if this is true for Islam, it's not true for a lot of other immigrant groups. Catholics from South America aren't making the culture super barbaric and doing tons of crime.
Given the general fact of assimilation, economic and fiscal contributions, and the fact that immigrants generally have lower crime rates than the native population (at least in the US), it doesn’t seem much like those are factors that are relevant to the point of them being innocent or not, and doesn’t obviate the larger point at all. I’m personally for a more targeted assimilation, but the point of the main post still stands.
Yeah when governments don’t prosecute immigrants for crimes they have lower crime rates. They still cause problems and no amount of rhetoric or statistical technicalities can hide that anymore
“Most of their inhabitants are innocent. They’re victims of their country’s evil minorities. If we welcome the innocents’ immigration, the vast majority will come here to work and live in peace with us. How can we say no?”
No, most of the inhabitants are guilty. You get these shitty outcomes in the third world over and over because they are collectively shitty people. When they move to the first world they make it more third world, and the more of them that come the more third world it gets.
Your just empirically wrong on this and won't admit it because its uncomfortable and a challenge to your ideology.
Even granting an IQ of 76 (which I have some issues with the Lynn dataset that comes from) the fact that you only cited India and already reached a quarter of a million, and the fact that a 130+ criteria is already rather stringent and generous in your favor (the original smart fraction theory posts argue contributions come from IQs greater than 108), it doesn’t seem to be a point against me. We know we can have a system where we deliberately choose for success because the H1-B visas have proven to be an economic boon in many ways. It’s not a random net we drop into India and pull out. Even anecdotally, my professors and fellow grad students in my physics PhD are overwhelming third worlders. The narrow and vague criteria of being “loyal” to a country is both irrelevant and morally confused. A businessman practicing trade tested betterment, bringing new products to market, allocating funds, hiring and buying doesn’t need to be “loyal” to his country in any meaningful sense to make the lives of his fellow countrymen better. A loyalty benchmark, aside from being a vacuous statist principle, is a vibe, not a coherent metric for a country’s development. Plenty of North Koreans are as loyal as can be. This point has been understood since Adam Smith. TFRs in East Asia are just a slightly more dramatic example of plummeting fertility than in other nations, and it’s laughable to dismiss these countries, with some of the best state capacities, highest value added production industries, and (in China’s case) the raw capacity to outpace the rest of the world in major research areas and infrastructure as being low productivity. Optimizing assimilation is far smarter than pretending like these people are universally or categorically drags on our society, especially when you look at the organic examples of elites America is able to produce as of late, which isn’t exactly a point of pride.
The rest of the Anglosphere (Canada, UK, etc) already ran your experiment over the last decade+ trying to max out H1B style Indian immigration. Canada has visa programs similar to the American H1B (literally most of the same requirements) and settled on a 500,000 immigration target (in a country with like 1/10th the population).
So what did trying to 50x H1B Indians get them? Rapid economic growth? Is Silicon Valley 2.0 in Toronto?
No, they've been had flat gdp per capita since 2012. The United States and Canada were equal in 2012. Now our gdp/capita is 60% higher than theirs. Max importing H1B Indians got Canada a bunch of foreign students that ransack food banks and a generation that can't afford a house.
This is exactly why you would expect the effect of trying to scale up Indian immigration would be if you thought India was a low IQ low trust country with a shallow bench of talent.
Canada and the rest of the anglosphere is moving away from this experiment because its been an unmitigated failure.
Once you start running the numbers about where innovation comes from you quickly realize nearly all of it is from Whites and Jews with East Asians providing the remainder though disappointing on a per capita basis. The rest of the world is basically a rounding error on human progress.
We would do quite well to pursue the path the Trump admin is on H1Bs. Increasing both the application fees and allocating by top salary. More high end European specialists, fewer mediocre Tata Consulting Indian H1B slop.
Japan's got a GDP per capita of $32k versus the USA of $86k. That's 60% lower then ours. If I use PPP its still 40% lower then ours. Its economy has been completely stalled since the 1990s. All the East Asian Tigers have the same story.
They literally canabalized the next generation to try and max short term growth and devoted their entire lives to the grind lifestyle of long unproductive hours from childhood to grave and they have NOTHING to show for it.
Take all that and apply it to China and its even worse.
Before I point out the empirically wrong and philosophically suspect argument, I’d suggest trying to get your grammar correct before posting nonsense. “You’re just empirically wrong,” is how it should read - and it should be stapled to your own forehead. American institutions are especially good at assimilating and integrating people, and even if you want a more targeted immigration policy, it would still be fruitful to bring in the millions of 130+ IQ people from third world countries. The basic category error letting you lump all third worlders together is empirically disproven by Nigerian in America. Instead of blanketed, ignorant, incorrect statements like “they are collectively shitty people” you could at least try to engage with historical and political scientific works like those of Jeffrey Herbst that try to explain state development in places like Africa.
"American institutions are especially good at assimilating and integrating people"
Not anymore they aren't. The two institutions immigrants will likely be involved with, public schools and universities, have been mostly taken over by anti-American leftists. Once the education system is completely overhauled, I'll trust that immigrants can be assimilated into a pro-American culture(not likely).
There aren't that many 130+ IQ people in the third world. Let's take India, average IQ 76. 0.0002 * 1.4B is 280,000 people. That's maybe 1% of how many white people reach the same threshold (quibble if you will). You could write off all of India at little loss.
Yeah I could fiddle with the numbers if I assume something in the 90s for Brahmins, but it doesn't change the overall picture much if I do.
And its hard to only allow 130IQ+ to immigrate because our immigration system has tons of chain migration.
This also assumes that 130 IQ automatically makes you a good addition to a society. Is that Nigerian loyal to America? What values does he have? What ends does he apply his intelligence to? I'm gonna give you a hint, he probably isn't a libertarian.
I'm sure that the next mayor of NYC probably has a high IQ. Got it from his socialist professor parents. Do you think his being here is going to make America a better place.
Let's take a more favorable example than the third world.
East Asia has an IQ average of 105. It has a lot more 130 IQ + people than us. And yet it's a lot poorer. And I'm not just talking China that maybe hasn't caught up yet. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc are all a lot poorer and seem to have stalled out. Rates of per capita innovation are way below what you would expect from their IQ. Their main specialization seems to be low productivity per hour worked, high suicide rates, and extinction level TFRs.
Would you really like our elite becoming more like the South Korean elite?
Phase 2 trials had “failed to meet their primary endpoints” in 2010. Ramaswamy devised a solution: His mother, Dr. Geetha Ramaswamy, conducted a new Phase 2 trial in 2015 involving “684 subjects.” This trial conveniently claimed to demonstrate sufficient improvement to “support Phase 3” trials.
The aftermath was a triumphant $350 million IPO in 2015, followed by a drastic fall. By September 2017, the stock had plummeted 75 percent after Ramaswamy and his mother announced the Phase 3 trial’s failure. Subsequent trials continued to disappoint, culminating in a 99 percent loss in value and a name change for the company.
While investors suffered significant losses, Ramaswamy profited from a higher media profile, IPO payouts, and the sale of remaining Axovant assets in 2020.
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I'm sure random high IQ people who grew up in a desperately poor caste ridden hellhole with an average IQ of 76 have exactly the same elite norms and values as we do, lol.
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If you making a narrow claim that we should be aggressively recruiting 130IQ+ STEM talent, I'll agree with you. I'll trade literally paying those people to move here for a 99% cut in immigration.
I figured out why your posts on mobile devices are always formatted wrong, it's because your combined handle + nick is too, any chance you could reduce one of them.
I have been mightily swayed by your writings on immigration, but more and more I would love to hear your answer to the following question. What would your country have to look like for you to say "oops, we let it get all screwed up by immigration." Every time I read about those 5:30am loudspeaker calls to prayer in Dearborn I wonder what you'd say if that happened to your town.
I get your overall point but on that specific point, I'd welcome it. I've lived in Muslim nations and I find the Adhan both beautiful and comforting; vastly more so that what I wake up to now instead in America: police sirens, leaf blowers, Harleys, hip hop, city events shooting off fireworks, high school bands and sports events, union lines and protestors shouting.
Tons, sadly no one would take us. See that is what people miss, it's not that everyone wants to come to America, it's simple gave one of the most liberal welcoming immigration policies in the world hence why they all come here. Try legally immigrating even now as a working class American, it's near impossible.
"Israel has the technology to beat Gaza. Why don't they? Because, like First World countries generally, they have a long list of self-limiting scruples about mass murder of the innocent."
Apparently you haven't been following the news for the past couple of years. Israel has demonstrated beyond all doubt that they have no scruples about mass murder of the innocent.
You do not understand the empirics that back up that statement. If Israel wanted to, it has the capacity to carpet bomb Gaza and kill 100% of its residents, and probably to fend off any objectors with nuclear weapons. Whatever you might argue about the degree of restraint they have acted with, it's not zero. Did Hamas kill just 0.01% of the population of Israel on October 7th because they were behaving with restraint, or because they didn't have the means to do more?
As I don't believe in objective morality, I think back to the roots of the term. The Greeks referred to people who didn't speak Greek as "barbarians", hence the later term "Berber". As it happens, the Punic civilization who lived in such lands and later rivaled the Romans engaged in extensive child sacrifice, but the Greeks themselves might have back in the Bronze Age. The "barbarian invasions" we recall are those that brought down the Roman empire, and merely asserting that Roman civilization was a "hardy weed" would do nothing to counteract that point.
African-Americans aren't citizens of any other countries they could legally be deported to (although both Jefferson and Lincoln thought they should form a colony in Africa, hence Liberia). However, in hindsight, it would seem to be better for the US if the slave ships had never arrived here and their inhabitants stayed in Africa. You might think that's completely different from contemporary immigration, but in Germany years after Merkel let in a wave of "Syrian refugees" (under the logic that they were mere "victims of the minority") only 20% were employed https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/economists-and-merkels-migrants/ And, as in many European countries, these immigrants from North Africa & the Middle East are vastly overrepresented in crime statistics (Turkey less so among majority Muslim sources, and of course the US' more selective system works better precisely because it's selective). Lee Yuan Kew didn't close his door completely to immigrants, but he also didn't let some open borders moralist convince him to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs by letting everyone in.
If you look at 20th century crime stats in Germany, Turks fit that mold as well. People forget Turks have been immigrating to Germany in large number since I believe the 1960s. They started to get displaced by Turkish mutts in the 90s out of Bosnia who were then in turn displaced by 21st century Arab spring illegal immigrants to the points Turks are just chaff in German crime stats. It's not though they became any less criminalagenic.
Yeah but the histories are different. Also, if Germany is an example, if you shot every North African in Brussels, crime wouldn't decrease, the local Turks would just pick up the slack. It's kind of like when Albanian organized crime supplants Italian organized crime in an area, it didn't make the Italians any less criminalagenic, they just get a vastly smaller slice but they always there waiting to pick it back up.
A great word - thanks for sharing. Discouraged by what looks like our lapse into barbarism, I'm hoping maybe a few people will listen to voices like yours.
That asterisk makes it sound like collective punishment to me! Keep in mind even among the worst immigrant groups, the proportion of violent criminals tends to be less than half. That's a lot of innocents. We have a duty to punish the guilty and *protect* the innocent
"My proposed answer: The distinction fundamentally comes down to: How well do you treat not only insiders, but outsiders? Maximally civilized societies don’t just scrupulously respect members’ rights to life and property; they afford exactly the same rights to all intelligent beings. Maximally barbaric societies, in contrast, see nothing wrong with murdering and robbing outsiders, even if they treat their own members well."
I don't agree with this. Civilization arises from a society expanding its in-group identity to encompass the entire civilization. This is what allows rule of law, trust, and cooperation between strangers. Expanding this to out-groups is not necessary, and sometimes even detrimental. A civilization that can't defend itself can be destroyed from the outside (it if isn't willing to fight external enemies) and from the inside (if its in-group identity is allowed to erode).
Your second society wouldn't survive more than incidental contact with outsiders, and would fall apart if it attempted to scale beyond a handful of members without establishing a stronger cultural identity and being willing to defend it. In the real world, those kinds of groups of people engage in a lot of tribal conflict.
"Any deeply civilized society will look at even the most barbarous societies and reflect: “Most of their inhabitants are innocent."
This is a childish dichotomy. A person can be "innocent" of any particular crime while still having cultural attitudes that contribute to high levels of criminality. People who are used to siding with kin and aren't used to obeying rules are going to breed criminals in a larger society even if they're functional within small groups and know how to be generous to the odd stranger here and there.
Complex societies have low levels of crime when the overwhelming majority of people have internalized the values of law and order to the point where they are willing to obey the law without external consequences and will reflexively punish people who don't. Even just having a high level of tolerance for law breaking, even if most people don't break the law themselves, will quickly spiral out of control until the society is ruled by gangs. Societal order requires active maintenance.
"If high rates of native-born black crime don’t justify the punishment of all native-born blacks, why would high rates of Syrian immigrant crime justify the punishment of all Syrian immigrants?"
Not allowing people into your home is not "punishing" them. Your position on immigration continues to rely on a positive rights theory whereby people, by default, have the right to move here. You keep going back to it, over and over again, without ever having dealt with the actual objections to it. And you also continue to claim that public property is "uncivilized", but rather than trying to actually work out how that should be dissolved into private property you just use it as an excuse to claim that it's unowned, and thus if a band of immigrants from across the planet wants to claim the street in front of my house and prevent me from ever leaving my house again that's perfectly okay.
There's 2 problems here, first, If civilization was the way societies treated people, you would exclude the most sophisticated societies that man has every created, including Rome, Persia and any other large, complex but brutal society before the modern era, which would be absurd. Civilization would be better defined as the distance a society is from the barest subsistence state of man, the further away a society is from hunting food for it's sustenance and doing nothing else, the more civilised it is are because it has managed to organise itself more efficiently to allow for higher minded pursuits like art and science.
Secondly, the vast majority of people living in the 3rd world are not mere victims of a few barbarous people, 3rd world nations do not have the state power to influence behaviour on that scale, the low trust is a function of day to day interactions not the incompetent military leader at the top. Japan and Germany at their worst still maintained strong social norms and civilised person to person behaviour. Negative cultural values are very damaging to a high trust society because every adverse interaction has a larger negative impact than every good interaction has a positive one. It's a game of prisoners dilemma where people that have gotten used to cooperating by default, find themselves suffering from a series of defections and are forced to get defensive and defect as well.
"They’re victims of their country’s evil minorities"
This, I believe, is said with respect to Third World countries where "brutality is mostly limited by technology". But an astounding statement nevertheless. What are these "evil minorities" that are victimizing the poor Third World majorities. For example, in India or Bangladesh?
The statement is mysterious for other reasons too. Is Third World a brutal place, India has 1.4 billion people living together, mostly peaceably. There are hardly any guns but you don't need much technology to commit brutalities.
The word civilization is related to the word City. And city is a place where one lives among strangers, unlike a village or a hunter-gatherer band.
So, to live in a city itself goes with at least a modicum of forbearance of strangers and self-control.
Civilization thus requires liberal and conservative virtues.
An overly civilized hunter-gatherer band is unlikely to survive.
Ironically, libertarian suspicion of the State is not conducive to civilization. To begin with, the liberal qualities were bred into human nature through living in State and by direct action of State viz through liberal administration of capital punishment.
"The first has advanced robotics, routine commercial space travel, and nanobots that keep you alive for thousands of years. It uses these technologies as Genghis Khan would have, traveling vast distances to enslave weaker groups and painfully murder all who resist. It uses public torture to keep its slaves in line.
The second society is stuck at the hunter-gatherer stage. They have no electricity, no irrigation, and no domesticated animals. When they encounter strangers, they offer warm hospitality. They share their fire and food, and inquire about possibilities for trade and intermarriage. They respect strangers’ lives and property even if those strangers are ungrateful or otherwise rude."
I prefer the first society.
1) By utilitarian standards it isn't at all obvious which one is preferable. Medical advances might more than make up for the torture taking place. I suspect that cancer alone has caused far more suffering than torture.
2) If you want to go to a society that unifies the good of society 1 & 2 it is probably easier to get there if society 1 is the starting point.
A respect for individual liberty and private ownership rights directly serves the psychological needs of adult human beings (who require moral and intellectual autonomy for optimizing their pursuit of happiness and for maintaining the integrity of their personal relationships with each other) as well as facilitating the furnishing of the material means for meeting those needs via capitalistic production with cutting-edge technologies, market exchanges, etc.
While respect for individual rights are necessary for optimizing one's pursuit of happiness, it doesn't follow that they are sufficient for that optimization. Of course we need the material means too, which is why most of us prefer sticking with civilization even when it is being exploited by ambitious warlords, avaricious political rent-seekers, etc.
“If we welcome the innocents’ immigration, the vast majority will come here to work and live in peace with us.” —- I think this is where rubber meets road with your assumptions.
IF these newcomers DID do as you suggest, that would be great. But would they? And based on observations to date, do they?
I also think the historic tendencies of prior cohorts of immigrants (first Europeans; then Asians) may not be replicated by the more recent trend from more third world/ Muslim majority nations. In the past, the vast majority of immigrants did integrate successfully and it was a win-win. I’m not so sure those patterns still hold, or can be presumed to hold.
While the distinction you make is very sensible, I think "civilized" is the wrong word to use. A "civilization" is, by common definition, a society that has developed written language, cities, a centralized state, and a system of social stratification. That last presumably puts outsiders on, or near, the bottom.
“Most of their inhabitants are innocent. They’re victims of their country’s evil minorities". They may also be victims of their often barbaric religions and dysfunctional cultures, which you conveniently ignore. Unfortunately, they take these with them when they emigrate.
Even if this is true for Islam, it's not true for a lot of other immigrant groups. Catholics from South America aren't making the culture super barbaric and doing tons of crime.
From a Western perspective, the difference between the Taliban and ordinary Afghan attitudes towards women is negligible.
Good thing we have federalist government with equal legal rights instituted and enforced for all people on the constitutional level.
Here women can go to police if they're being abused, or buy a gun over the counter and get their own place.
Unless their abuser is an illegal then they are told to quit being bigoted and to get over it
Given the general fact of assimilation, economic and fiscal contributions, and the fact that immigrants generally have lower crime rates than the native population (at least in the US), it doesn’t seem much like those are factors that are relevant to the point of them being innocent or not, and doesn’t obviate the larger point at all. I’m personally for a more targeted assimilation, but the point of the main post still stands.
Yeah when governments don’t prosecute immigrants for crimes they have lower crime rates. They still cause problems and no amount of rhetoric or statistical technicalities can hide that anymore
"(at least in the US)" is the key qualifier here.
I’m an American, Bryan is American, and other countries can move to emulate American institutions…
“Most of their inhabitants are innocent. They’re victims of their country’s evil minorities. If we welcome the innocents’ immigration, the vast majority will come here to work and live in peace with us. How can we say no?”
No, most of the inhabitants are guilty. You get these shitty outcomes in the third world over and over because they are collectively shitty people. When they move to the first world they make it more third world, and the more of them that come the more third world it gets.
Your just empirically wrong on this and won't admit it because its uncomfortable and a challenge to your ideology.
Even granting an IQ of 76 (which I have some issues with the Lynn dataset that comes from) the fact that you only cited India and already reached a quarter of a million, and the fact that a 130+ criteria is already rather stringent and generous in your favor (the original smart fraction theory posts argue contributions come from IQs greater than 108), it doesn’t seem to be a point against me. We know we can have a system where we deliberately choose for success because the H1-B visas have proven to be an economic boon in many ways. It’s not a random net we drop into India and pull out. Even anecdotally, my professors and fellow grad students in my physics PhD are overwhelming third worlders. The narrow and vague criteria of being “loyal” to a country is both irrelevant and morally confused. A businessman practicing trade tested betterment, bringing new products to market, allocating funds, hiring and buying doesn’t need to be “loyal” to his country in any meaningful sense to make the lives of his fellow countrymen better. A loyalty benchmark, aside from being a vacuous statist principle, is a vibe, not a coherent metric for a country’s development. Plenty of North Koreans are as loyal as can be. This point has been understood since Adam Smith. TFRs in East Asia are just a slightly more dramatic example of plummeting fertility than in other nations, and it’s laughable to dismiss these countries, with some of the best state capacities, highest value added production industries, and (in China’s case) the raw capacity to outpace the rest of the world in major research areas and infrastructure as being low productivity. Optimizing assimilation is far smarter than pretending like these people are universally or categorically drags on our society, especially when you look at the organic examples of elites America is able to produce as of late, which isn’t exactly a point of pride.
The rest of the Anglosphere (Canada, UK, etc) already ran your experiment over the last decade+ trying to max out H1B style Indian immigration. Canada has visa programs similar to the American H1B (literally most of the same requirements) and settled on a 500,000 immigration target (in a country with like 1/10th the population).
So what did trying to 50x H1B Indians get them? Rapid economic growth? Is Silicon Valley 2.0 in Toronto?
No, they've been had flat gdp per capita since 2012. The United States and Canada were equal in 2012. Now our gdp/capita is 60% higher than theirs. Max importing H1B Indians got Canada a bunch of foreign students that ransack food banks and a generation that can't afford a house.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/latest-updates/international-students-in-canada-face-food-insecurity-amid-food-bank-access-restrictions/articleshow/121262018.cms?from=mdr
This is exactly why you would expect the effect of trying to scale up Indian immigration would be if you thought India was a low IQ low trust country with a shallow bench of talent.
Canada and the rest of the anglosphere is moving away from this experiment because its been an unmitigated failure.
https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/immigrants-from-where
Once you start running the numbers about where innovation comes from you quickly realize nearly all of it is from Whites and Jews with East Asians providing the remainder though disappointing on a per capita basis. The rest of the world is basically a rounding error on human progress.
We would do quite well to pursue the path the Trump admin is on H1Bs. Increasing both the application fees and allocating by top salary. More high end European specialists, fewer mediocre Tata Consulting Indian H1B slop.
Japan's got a GDP per capita of $32k versus the USA of $86k. That's 60% lower then ours. If I use PPP its still 40% lower then ours. Its economy has been completely stalled since the 1990s. All the East Asian Tigers have the same story.
They literally canabalized the next generation to try and max short term growth and devoted their entire lives to the grind lifestyle of long unproductive hours from childhood to grave and they have NOTHING to show for it.
Take all that and apply it to China and its even worse.
Before I point out the empirically wrong and philosophically suspect argument, I’d suggest trying to get your grammar correct before posting nonsense. “You’re just empirically wrong,” is how it should read - and it should be stapled to your own forehead. American institutions are especially good at assimilating and integrating people, and even if you want a more targeted immigration policy, it would still be fruitful to bring in the millions of 130+ IQ people from third world countries. The basic category error letting you lump all third worlders together is empirically disproven by Nigerian in America. Instead of blanketed, ignorant, incorrect statements like “they are collectively shitty people” you could at least try to engage with historical and political scientific works like those of Jeffrey Herbst that try to explain state development in places like Africa.
"American institutions are especially good at assimilating and integrating people"
Not anymore they aren't. The two institutions immigrants will likely be involved with, public schools and universities, have been mostly taken over by anti-American leftists. Once the education system is completely overhauled, I'll trust that immigrants can be assimilated into a pro-American culture(not likely).
There aren't that many 130+ IQ people in the third world. Let's take India, average IQ 76. 0.0002 * 1.4B is 280,000 people. That's maybe 1% of how many white people reach the same threshold (quibble if you will). You could write off all of India at little loss.
Yeah I could fiddle with the numbers if I assume something in the 90s for Brahmins, but it doesn't change the overall picture much if I do.
And its hard to only allow 130IQ+ to immigrate because our immigration system has tons of chain migration.
This also assumes that 130 IQ automatically makes you a good addition to a society. Is that Nigerian loyal to America? What values does he have? What ends does he apply his intelligence to? I'm gonna give you a hint, he probably isn't a libertarian.
I'm sure that the next mayor of NYC probably has a high IQ. Got it from his socialist professor parents. Do you think his being here is going to make America a better place.
Let's take a more favorable example than the third world.
East Asia has an IQ average of 105. It has a lot more 130 IQ + people than us. And yet it's a lot poorer. And I'm not just talking China that maybe hasn't caught up yet. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc are all a lot poorer and seem to have stalled out. Rates of per capita innovation are way below what you would expect from their IQ. Their main specialization seems to be low productivity per hour worked, high suicide rates, and extinction level TFRs.
Would you really like our elite becoming more like the South Korean elite?
Is your vision for America this:
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507?lang=en
BTW, Vivek applied his intelligence to this:
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Phase 2 trials had “failed to meet their primary endpoints” in 2010. Ramaswamy devised a solution: His mother, Dr. Geetha Ramaswamy, conducted a new Phase 2 trial in 2015 involving “684 subjects.” This trial conveniently claimed to demonstrate sufficient improvement to “support Phase 3” trials.
The aftermath was a triumphant $350 million IPO in 2015, followed by a drastic fall. By September 2017, the stock had plummeted 75 percent after Ramaswamy and his mother announced the Phase 3 trial’s failure. Subsequent trials continued to disappoint, culminating in a 99 percent loss in value and a name change for the company.
While investors suffered significant losses, Ramaswamy profited from a higher media profile, IPO payouts, and the sale of remaining Axovant assets in 2020.
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I'm sure random high IQ people who grew up in a desperately poor caste ridden hellhole with an average IQ of 76 have exactly the same elite norms and values as we do, lol.
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If you making a narrow claim that we should be aggressively recruiting 130IQ+ STEM talent, I'll agree with you. I'll trade literally paying those people to move here for a 99% cut in immigration.
What an analysis
I figured out why your posts on mobile devices are always formatted wrong, it's because your combined handle + nick is too, any chance you could reduce one of them.
I have been mightily swayed by your writings on immigration, but more and more I would love to hear your answer to the following question. What would your country have to look like for you to say "oops, we let it get all screwed up by immigration." Every time I read about those 5:30am loudspeaker calls to prayer in Dearborn I wonder what you'd say if that happened to your town.
I get your overall point but on that specific point, I'd welcome it. I've lived in Muslim nations and I find the Adhan both beautiful and comforting; vastly more so that what I wake up to now instead in America: police sirens, leaf blowers, Harleys, hip hop, city events shooting off fireworks, high school bands and sports events, union lines and protestors shouting.
I think a better question to ponder would be: what country could we flee to if the US was screwed up by immigration?
Japan, just be prepared to perfect your Japanese and wait for decades to get a passport.
Tons, sadly no one would take us. See that is what people miss, it's not that everyone wants to come to America, it's simple gave one of the most liberal welcoming immigration policies in the world hence why they all come here. Try legally immigrating even now as a working class American, it's near impossible.
"Israel has the technology to beat Gaza. Why don't they? Because, like First World countries generally, they have a long list of self-limiting scruples about mass murder of the innocent."
Apparently you haven't been following the news for the past couple of years. Israel has demonstrated beyond all doubt that they have no scruples about mass murder of the innocent.
You do not understand the empirics that back up that statement. If Israel wanted to, it has the capacity to carpet bomb Gaza and kill 100% of its residents, and probably to fend off any objectors with nuclear weapons. Whatever you might argue about the degree of restraint they have acted with, it's not zero. Did Hamas kill just 0.01% of the population of Israel on October 7th because they were behaving with restraint, or because they didn't have the means to do more?
"If you know any way to help me civilize them, I’m all ears."
First, you need to understand that you might be the uncivilised one (by not privatising all property before "opening the borders"). Second, you need to address your critics in the comments. https://jclester.substack.com/p/open-borders-today-stupid-or-sinister
As I don't believe in objective morality, I think back to the roots of the term. The Greeks referred to people who didn't speak Greek as "barbarians", hence the later term "Berber". As it happens, the Punic civilization who lived in such lands and later rivaled the Romans engaged in extensive child sacrifice, but the Greeks themselves might have back in the Bronze Age. The "barbarian invasions" we recall are those that brought down the Roman empire, and merely asserting that Roman civilization was a "hardy weed" would do nothing to counteract that point.
African-Americans aren't citizens of any other countries they could legally be deported to (although both Jefferson and Lincoln thought they should form a colony in Africa, hence Liberia). However, in hindsight, it would seem to be better for the US if the slave ships had never arrived here and their inhabitants stayed in Africa. You might think that's completely different from contemporary immigration, but in Germany years after Merkel let in a wave of "Syrian refugees" (under the logic that they were mere "victims of the minority") only 20% were employed https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/economists-and-merkels-migrants/ And, as in many European countries, these immigrants from North Africa & the Middle East are vastly overrepresented in crime statistics (Turkey less so among majority Muslim sources, and of course the US' more selective system works better precisely because it's selective). Lee Yuan Kew didn't close his door completely to immigrants, but he also didn't let some open borders moralist convince him to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs by letting everyone in.
If you look at 20th century crime stats in Germany, Turks fit that mold as well. People forget Turks have been immigrating to Germany in large number since I believe the 1960s. They started to get displaced by Turkish mutts in the 90s out of Bosnia who were then in turn displaced by 21st century Arab spring illegal immigrants to the points Turks are just chaff in German crime stats. It's not though they became any less criminalagenic.
Within Brussels there are both North African & Turkish immigrants. The former seem to be FAR more of a problem.
Yeah but the histories are different. Also, if Germany is an example, if you shot every North African in Brussels, crime wouldn't decrease, the local Turks would just pick up the slack. It's kind of like when Albanian organized crime supplants Italian organized crime in an area, it didn't make the Italians any less criminalagenic, they just get a vastly smaller slice but they always there waiting to pick it back up.
A great word - thanks for sharing. Discouraged by what looks like our lapse into barbarism, I'm hoping maybe a few people will listen to voices like yours.
It is not collective punishment when they are indeed all* guilty.
*All, in this case, does not refer to literally 100.0000%
That asterisk makes it sound like collective punishment to me! Keep in mind even among the worst immigrant groups, the proportion of violent criminals tends to be less than half. That's a lot of innocents. We have a duty to punish the guilty and *protect* the innocent
You seem to be rather tolerant to any misconduct, so long as it is not both violent and a criminal offence.
90% is good enough for most people. After all, how often do you get 100.0000% as a value, in anything short of physics and maths?
"My proposed answer: The distinction fundamentally comes down to: How well do you treat not only insiders, but outsiders? Maximally civilized societies don’t just scrupulously respect members’ rights to life and property; they afford exactly the same rights to all intelligent beings. Maximally barbaric societies, in contrast, see nothing wrong with murdering and robbing outsiders, even if they treat their own members well."
I don't agree with this. Civilization arises from a society expanding its in-group identity to encompass the entire civilization. This is what allows rule of law, trust, and cooperation between strangers. Expanding this to out-groups is not necessary, and sometimes even detrimental. A civilization that can't defend itself can be destroyed from the outside (it if isn't willing to fight external enemies) and from the inside (if its in-group identity is allowed to erode).
Your second society wouldn't survive more than incidental contact with outsiders, and would fall apart if it attempted to scale beyond a handful of members without establishing a stronger cultural identity and being willing to defend it. In the real world, those kinds of groups of people engage in a lot of tribal conflict.
"Any deeply civilized society will look at even the most barbarous societies and reflect: “Most of their inhabitants are innocent."
This is a childish dichotomy. A person can be "innocent" of any particular crime while still having cultural attitudes that contribute to high levels of criminality. People who are used to siding with kin and aren't used to obeying rules are going to breed criminals in a larger society even if they're functional within small groups and know how to be generous to the odd stranger here and there.
Complex societies have low levels of crime when the overwhelming majority of people have internalized the values of law and order to the point where they are willing to obey the law without external consequences and will reflexively punish people who don't. Even just having a high level of tolerance for law breaking, even if most people don't break the law themselves, will quickly spiral out of control until the society is ruled by gangs. Societal order requires active maintenance.
"If high rates of native-born black crime don’t justify the punishment of all native-born blacks, why would high rates of Syrian immigrant crime justify the punishment of all Syrian immigrants?"
Not allowing people into your home is not "punishing" them. Your position on immigration continues to rely on a positive rights theory whereby people, by default, have the right to move here. You keep going back to it, over and over again, without ever having dealt with the actual objections to it. And you also continue to claim that public property is "uncivilized", but rather than trying to actually work out how that should be dissolved into private property you just use it as an excuse to claim that it's unowned, and thus if a band of immigrants from across the planet wants to claim the street in front of my house and prevent me from ever leaving my house again that's perfectly okay.
There's 2 problems here, first, If civilization was the way societies treated people, you would exclude the most sophisticated societies that man has every created, including Rome, Persia and any other large, complex but brutal society before the modern era, which would be absurd. Civilization would be better defined as the distance a society is from the barest subsistence state of man, the further away a society is from hunting food for it's sustenance and doing nothing else, the more civilised it is are because it has managed to organise itself more efficiently to allow for higher minded pursuits like art and science.
Secondly, the vast majority of people living in the 3rd world are not mere victims of a few barbarous people, 3rd world nations do not have the state power to influence behaviour on that scale, the low trust is a function of day to day interactions not the incompetent military leader at the top. Japan and Germany at their worst still maintained strong social norms and civilised person to person behaviour. Negative cultural values are very damaging to a high trust society because every adverse interaction has a larger negative impact than every good interaction has a positive one. It's a game of prisoners dilemma where people that have gotten used to cooperating by default, find themselves suffering from a series of defections and are forced to get defensive and defect as well.
"They’re victims of their country’s evil minorities"
This, I believe, is said with respect to Third World countries where "brutality is mostly limited by technology". But an astounding statement nevertheless. What are these "evil minorities" that are victimizing the poor Third World majorities. For example, in India or Bangladesh?
The statement is mysterious for other reasons too. Is Third World a brutal place, India has 1.4 billion people living together, mostly peaceably. There are hardly any guns but you don't need much technology to commit brutalities.
The word civilization is related to the word City. And city is a place where one lives among strangers, unlike a village or a hunter-gatherer band.
So, to live in a city itself goes with at least a modicum of forbearance of strangers and self-control.
Civilization thus requires liberal and conservative virtues.
An overly civilized hunter-gatherer band is unlikely to survive.
Ironically, libertarian suspicion of the State is not conducive to civilization. To begin with, the liberal qualities were bred into human nature through living in State and by direct action of State viz through liberal administration of capital punishment.
"The first has advanced robotics, routine commercial space travel, and nanobots that keep you alive for thousands of years. It uses these technologies as Genghis Khan would have, traveling vast distances to enslave weaker groups and painfully murder all who resist. It uses public torture to keep its slaves in line.
The second society is stuck at the hunter-gatherer stage. They have no electricity, no irrigation, and no domesticated animals. When they encounter strangers, they offer warm hospitality. They share their fire and food, and inquire about possibilities for trade and intermarriage. They respect strangers’ lives and property even if those strangers are ungrateful or otherwise rude."
I prefer the first society.
1) By utilitarian standards it isn't at all obvious which one is preferable. Medical advances might more than make up for the torture taking place. I suspect that cancer alone has caused far more suffering than torture.
2) If you want to go to a society that unifies the good of society 1 & 2 it is probably easier to get there if society 1 is the starting point.
3) The first society is much cooler in any case.
A respect for individual liberty and private ownership rights directly serves the psychological needs of adult human beings (who require moral and intellectual autonomy for optimizing their pursuit of happiness and for maintaining the integrity of their personal relationships with each other) as well as facilitating the furnishing of the material means for meeting those needs via capitalistic production with cutting-edge technologies, market exchanges, etc.
While respect for individual rights are necessary for optimizing one's pursuit of happiness, it doesn't follow that they are sufficient for that optimization. Of course we need the material means too, which is why most of us prefer sticking with civilization even when it is being exploited by ambitious warlords, avaricious political rent-seekers, etc.
“If we welcome the innocents’ immigration, the vast majority will come here to work and live in peace with us.” —- I think this is where rubber meets road with your assumptions.
IF these newcomers DID do as you suggest, that would be great. But would they? And based on observations to date, do they?
I also think the historic tendencies of prior cohorts of immigrants (first Europeans; then Asians) may not be replicated by the more recent trend from more third world/ Muslim majority nations. In the past, the vast majority of immigrants did integrate successfully and it was a win-win. I’m not so sure those patterns still hold, or can be presumed to hold.
While the distinction you make is very sensible, I think "civilized" is the wrong word to use. A "civilization" is, by common definition, a society that has developed written language, cities, a centralized state, and a system of social stratification. That last presumably puts outsiders on, or near, the bottom.