>Individual humans can believe that a broad ecological collapse is coming and still live their day to day lives in ignorance of this belief.
This sentence is contradictory. How could one believe a particular thing, and then intentionally live in ignorance of this thing?
>Self-assess honestly and you'll find examples in your own life.
Okay. I did the assessment. I found that when I have deeply held beliefs I live my life according to those beliefs. For example, I strongly believe that learning new languages is the most efficient way to maintain neuroplasticity, for a number of reasons. Therefore, I spend 30-60 minutes each day studying languages. Do you have examples in your own life where you believe something to be true, but then intentionally don't live your life as if that thing were true?
Yeah great example of what I’m talking about. Technology people on the technology website don’t seem interested in figuring out how to use technology to mitigate any effects of a changing climate. All they care about is “carbon number go down”, as if turning off power plants magically reduces the amount of fires.
Yes. A mature society manages its natural resources for the betterment of its people. It doesn't throw its hands up and say "well shit, guess it's that 500 year cycle again". As a meta comment, climate change is this very odd thing on this website. On the one hand, more or less everyone agrees that a vast amount of time and effort should be spent on renewable energy generation (though transmission infrastructure doesn't get mentioned enough) to "combat" climate change. On the other, almost no one thinks about the 2nd and 3rd order effects of climate change and whether or not dropping carbon emissions actually does anything on a timescale that matters. Suppose we did this. Do we think the impact is immediate? Probably not! Therefore, more time should be spent on technologies and means to manage what changes in the climate are already "baked in", so to speak. That's part of why climate change discourse is so tiresome to me. So many people will tell you the end of the world is around the corner, but they sure as hell don't act like it.
I don’t follow. If I believed the global climate was going to collapse imminently (it’s not) I would have a very specific to do list and would be spending every hour of my free time preparing for this event. Is your point that people performatively engage in catastrophizing? In which case, I agree.
They don’t. If people actually believed this stuff they’d be learning how to hunt, get good with long guns, filter their own water etc. Revealed preferences always smash headlong into one’s imagination.
What does the middle of nowhere have to do with this? We have technology that allows us to fly. You fly out, conduct controlled burns, cut out bad growth, install firebreaks. This is not an unsolved for process. For whatever reason, it’s not happening and these fires are the result. People really need to stop thinking so one dimensionally about these kinds of problems.
Interesting, then I guess the obvious next question is … is there a test for being a susceptible patient? We’ve been talking about long COVID for years now. Surely there’s some commonalities amongst the people who suffer from it.
Yeah, this is true, and PRC is pretty explicit about this too. For those who pay close attention to stuff like this, the raw comparisons in dollars spent are just not that useful with PRC has developed entire industry infrastructure around swiftly swapping over to a military purpose.
I could not disagree harder with this sentiment. DS and DS2 are beautiful games with deep, meaty narratives that are satisfying and rewarding, which is why players spend hours walking around digital wastelands delivering mail. Only Kojima could make “post-apocalyptic UPS guy, the video game” and have it work.
>I believe in universal human rights and equality/fairness in application of laws. You seem like you don't
This is the same thing and you know it. I've already explained how your position is unworkable at scale.
>If your position is just that states can favor citizens in some respects, I think there is no argument there. Where I disagree is with using that rationale as a way to justify broad disfavor toward legal residents or non-citizens as an entire class (whether administratively practical or not).
That's the whole point of a government! If a government lets a group of people in, and they misbehave, they can and should kick this group out. It is not more complicated than that.
So, again, America seems to be the only country where everyone else claims a positive right to enter and dictate what we do. You do not have this right. It never existed. You were convinced that it existed by a combination of overly generous federal spending and the center-left boomer generation winning a few elections here.
>Cooperation is really the core mechanism for societal growth
This is an interesting claim to make when almost all of the leaps forward in technology advancement came either during a war, as part of the lead up to one, or within the context of a cold war. Similar to the entryist problem, everyone demands cooperation from the United States, no one asks for partnership.
>in this case, by creating a subclass
This is literally the point of the concept of the Citizen. A Citizen is prioritized in their own country. A non-Citizen is not. Something happened with education because it feels like we have to go back to deriving the point of the nation-state from first principles.
Nothing I am saying conflicts with this mythology of yours. I think the part of mythology that does not get told often enough is that every instance of large scale immigration into this country has resulted in strife and violence. The Ellis island stories, for example, were largely embellished and were done so after the fact, and it took the Second World War to finally integrate the different groups that came here over the preceding decades. The problem I have with the immigration of today is that the levels of cultural distance are much, much higher than Ellis island. America is the only country in the world where people who do not live here and have no connection to it claim a positive right to enter. I don’t blame them for wanting to enter, and you should not blame me for having the disciple to say no.
Huh? The administration that has an entire police force larger than the United States Marine Corps solely dedicated to immigration enforcement doesn’t agree with me that there is a problem with immigration diluting the voice of Americans already here. Okay. That’s certainly a take that one can have. You should just plainly state your point and preferred policy outcome because when you wrap it up in your moralizing (“I’d encourage you to think about [irrelevant point X]”) it obscures what you’re actually trying to say. I think it’s that this WH is engaged in a vast conspiracy to trick people into thinking that immigration is a policy priority when in fact it’s not. But this is obviously not true.
My point about 1999 has nothing to do with nostalgia. It has everything to do with absolutely no one asking for entire neighborhoods and towns to be turned into impenetrable foreign countries. There is a stark difference between immigration that brought people like Rubio here and mass migration from e.g. Somalia, in terms of scale, context, and timeframe.
I don’t understand your point. Is it that because Marco Rubio is Cuban I need to accept unlimited immigration, forever? This isn’t a position held by anyone in this administration, recent immigration history or not. My point is actually really narrow. The actual political movement with power and influence wishes to increase immigration to dilute the voice of the people already here, because the people already here do not vote in the way that the movement prefers and the immigrants do. Your condescending tone aside, I think it’s very easy to observe that my observation is correct because I can do things like “drive around my hometown” or “visit a major city” and the difference between today and, say, 1999 would make the conclusion obvious.
You are wrong. My ideas aren't "nativist", they are the mean feeling on this subject for 250 years in this country. It has taken a tremendous amount of effort to convince people that things like "borders", "state sovereignty", and "being discerning about who you let into the country" is bad, evil even. That's why you think you can throw around the word "nativist" as a pejorative. I don't like Ronald Reagan for many reasons, and I don't know which quote you are referring to (though I can venture a guess), so I'm not sure what the point of that appeal is. Like I said, if you think that it's good to dilute the voice of people whose families have been here for a dozen generations by pretending that people who got here 15 minutes ago have the same values that's fine. But you won't get me to agree with you. If you want the country to be more left wing and increasing immigration gets you closer to that goal, just say that, it's cleaner.
I think what you mean to say is that as a result of this ruling the voice of Americans can be diluted over time so that your preferred political outcomes can happen. Not everyone in my country believes that the concept of the nation state is stupid and should be done away with. I understand that there are many who do think this, and I have to live amicably among them, but it doesn't mean that I need to pretend that your ideas are good for me and my kin.
Yes we’ve established what you believe and how you return to screaming “you’re a racist” instead of actually contemplating the logical end state of your bewildering moralizing for longer than ten seconds.
The concept of a passport didn’t emerge out of the ether. If you were traveling on official business, for the state or the military or as a merchant, you’d be carrying papers that said as much. Much of it relied on trust and reputation, and assuming we’re talking about say medieval Europe possibly the signature or word of a Lord. As for enforcement, violence was common.
Part of the reason this thread and this topic is so fraught is there are many people, like you, who are willingly and confidently lying about history. Strict borders have existed since ancient times. There are physical markers of them all over Europe that are more than 1000 years old. You can see other borders from space. This idea that only in the 20th century did this idea emerge is so wrong that it’s got the history completely and totally inverted. Why make stuff up like this?
The reason you are having a hard time understanding these points is because you genuinely don’t believe that nation states should exist. You may not think this explicitly, but that is the logical conclusion of the moral/ethical haranguing you are doing. What are you expecting as an acceptable counter argument here? Someone to develop the justification of the nation state from first principles? Your argument is that there is a universal principle of equality which disallows countries discriminating in favor of their own citizens. This is unworkable because the whole point of the nation state is to discriminate in favor of its own citizens.
This is a weird argument, because it presupposes that there is a positive right a priori to migrate to a country, and that it’s on the target country to come up with a reason to keep someone out. Setting aside for a moment that this is not how it works today, nor is this ever how these rights have been managed, and also setting aside the lack of a mechanism to screen for this (are you making everyone take a lie detector test or something), how about Pakistan?
Also, we are not saying the same thing at all. I am making a claim, which is true and very very visible, that when you allow large scale migration the country being migrated to begins to resemble the country being migrated from. And this is unsurprising. How could it not? There is no magic passport stamp that updates someone’s views and attitudes upon entry. As a meta comment this whole debate is really fucking strange because my position is the nominal position throughout basically all of human history, and yours is an extreme version of the blank slate hypothesis. Strange to encounter, to say the least.
Why are you continually making up a strawman to argue against? If a country has regressive views that are one standard deviation more regressive than the mean view on that topic in Europe, and you allow 1 million people from that country to migrate, has Europe gotten more or less regressive in it’s views on that topic? Has it stayed the same? Notice that I am not making a claim that 100% of the population hold only 1 view, and no one else is making this claim either, but that these view exist on a distribution that has been repeatedly modeled.
Your views about individual autonomy etc are, while probably good rules to live by in your personal interactions, not really relevant to migration at the population level.