rayiner

If things are as you described it, then isn’t that fear rational? What you seem to be saying is that people should hope that things happen differently this time than it did in history. That seems like the irrational part.

To the contrary, I think our education system has so over focused on “xenophobia” and things like that that people are unable to understand the myriad other and more significant social factors that exist between human groups.

Dumb, low impulse control, poorly socialized. My mother in law by contrast lives in a part of the Oregon coast in a town where most of the kids' parents are divorced. They make bad decisions, impulse purchases, have run-ins with the law, etc. By contrast in the WASPy Virginia suburbs where I grew up, I knew one kid with divorced parents. I didn't know anybody who got arrested, had a substance-abuse problem, etc. Almost everyone I knew went to college.

Anthropic should report these people to the authorities as antisocials who are likely abusing real people too. I know the chat bot isn’t conscious but I can’t fathom how fucked up someone must be to gratuitously be cruel to something that responds as if it’s a person.

I think the better comparison is that Elon’s mostly paper wealth amounts to less than the real dollars the federal and state governments spend every single month.

They don't need to lobby, because they're already on the inside. 95% of the government is run by the bureaucracy, so they can directly implement their ideological preferences. That's how you get situations like in Europe where the policies don't change regardless of which party is elected.

> A provocation might have been Iran waking up one day and deciding to hammer Israel or US bases with missiles.

That's what happened! Iran is just adding a layer of indirection by funneling money and missiles to Hamas and Hezbollah, who in turn launch the attacks. They don't even try to hide it. Why should acting through a middle-man insulated them from culpability?

> Even then, targeting a head of state might be going too far.

I actually agree with you on that. But I don't think it's fair to downplay the "fucking around" that Iran did before they "found out."

> Iran has a “beef” with Israel because of Palestine.

Which makes no sense geopolitically. Iran has no dog in that fight. Iran has no sympathy to Palestinians--they host millions of Afghan refugees, but nobody from Palestine. The Arabs hate Iran too. If Israel wasn't there, Iran would be the primary focus of Arab antagonism. Israel and Iran had good relations with each other between 1950 and 1979, and that made logical sense from the perspective of what was most beneficial to the people of both countries.

I view Iran as a real tragedy. Not because of "human rights and democracy blah blah blah." I have no problem with Iranians having a theocracy if that's what they want. What blows my mind is that Iran has the potential to be a highly functional country, but simply chooses to waste it's money and political capital on irrationally antagonizing countries that it could have been allied with instead.

You're overlooking the real benefit to people who obtain value from promoting their ideology even at a government salary.

The percentage of people who can vote isn't a linear measure of "democracy." It's the classic case of "getting from 0 to 1 is the hard part." Extending the franchise to a large fraction of the population and having stable transition of power and fair elections is the hard part.

And women have been able to vote in the U.S. for decades longer than the governments of the E.U.'s largest countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) have existed in their current democratic forms. When women got the right to vote in Wyoming, kicking off the movement towards national women's suffrage, the French were on Napoleon III, Spain had a king, Germany wasn't even a country yet, and Italy was a recently unified Kingdom.

Most people aren't capable of understanding numbers: https://politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-math.... You can't educate them to do it, any more than you can educate your average person to be able to reliably hit three pointers. It's a physical limitation.

That's why socialization is so important. You can't get voters to understand the difference between billions and trillions or put anything in context when the numbers get that big. All you can do is socialize them from an early age to have directionally correct gut feelings like, "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "saving is good."

Half of Europe didn't even get democracy until the 20th century and they're calling Americans "stupid"? LOL.

> Corporations and rich people give money to politicians. Not directly, of course: to their campaigns.

It is illegal under U.S. federal law for corporations to give money to campaigns.

> Unprovoked here means that this was not a response to an attack by Iran on Israel or the US.

Are you defining "attack by Iran" to exclude attacks by proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah that Iran funds to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year?

What's insane to me is that nobody actually has a beef with Iran. Tel Aviv is a thousand miles away from Tehran. The Arab countries don't like Iran, nor does Iran like any of the Arab countries. There's no conflict over land or resources. Iran is doing this shit purely for love of the game.

There's a perfectly plausible counterfactual history where Iran chooses to focus on economic development instead of antagonizing Israel and you end up with two technologically advanced developed countries in the region.

I mean not really, but I'm using a relative scale. I count them because they're about as similar to Anglos as the Anglo subgroups (Yankees, Southerners, Appalachians) are to each other. Most importantly they have generic American identity--they don't specially identify with or have special affinity for other German Americans. In that respect they're more like Anglos and different from most of the immigrant groups that came after them.

> Historically, assimilation into American culture tends to happen over two to three generations.

Here's a book with evidence of how that's not true. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0BCKYZ1VY/geneexpre.... Americans with European ancestry display variations in attitudes that are still strongly correlated with those of their countries of origin.

> I've read that this is a widespread phenomenon among immigrants from every country.

People think "speaking English" and "wearing jeans" is assimilation. But that's superficial stuff. How many groups assimilated into WASP austerity or self-deprecation? Not very many. I live in Annapolis and it's trivially easy to tell the various European-American groups apart if more than a few of the same type are congregated together (e.g. church gatherings).

I strongly oppose the Iran war. But saying that any action against Iran is “unprovoked” is utter bullshit. Iran just gave Hezbollah $200 million while Iranians are in dire straits: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/lebanons-hezbollah.... Iran has been doing this shit for decades. Their commitment to “fucking around” is truly epic.

Saddam, Maduro, Gaddafi, Assad—all those guys were mostly terrorizing their own people and shouldn’t have been taken out. I don’t think Khamenei should’ve been taken out either, but boy did he deserve it more than any of the others.

I was responding to the statement: “America can't win this war nor admit it can't win.”

Getting the oil supply back to prewar levels isn’t winning by itself, and I didn’t say it was. But it does open a path to winning, because holding the oil hostage is the only leverage the Iranian regime has.

You understand Islamic law was a huge advance in the territories where it took hold, right?

You keep changing the words. Above you said “Soviets.” I don’t think they’re soviets. But I do think they’re communists. So “communist infiltration” is accurate.

> I was reacting to your seeming insistence — which appears to be getting more pronounced — that immigrants should embrace Anglo culture as superior to their own.

Of course they should: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oWbNUcOenzU. I didn't know this was debatable. When people say "assimilate into American culture," they mean Anglo-American culture--like the Germans did.

Your theory that Americans can absorb the best elements from different cultures doesn't work in practice. For such evolutionary mechanisms to work, you need a fitness function that reflects which combinations are better. But people have an irrational sentimental attachment to their own culture and co-ethnics. They will stick with things that clearly don't perform rather than adopt things that clearly perform better.

Which circles back to my original point! That's why it's so important to understand why it is that our effort here in America goes so much farther than the same level of effort in our country run according to our cultural norms.

My point is that Russian propaganda from the 20th century made its way into intellectual water supply just like Russian propaganda from the 21st century. The propaganda is different, but the mechanism has parallels.

I didn't say it was an "unalloyed good." I said that our prosperity is the product of that system. So are many of the bad things about America! Funnily enough, the immigrants who are eager to write themselves into the story of American prosperity never seem to want to take credit for all bad things about America...

I also think you're missing the forest for the trees. You can find many cultures that enslaved people. The Arabs were trading African and European slaves for a thousand years before Europeans showed up to booming slave markets Africans themselves had built. But you can't find any culture that undertook large-scale worldwide efforts to end slavery, or any one that killed hundreds of thousands of their co-ethnics to end slavery for other people. Are you aware of any other society that has done that?

> But in the main they had reasonable shares of motivation, family orientation, and work ethic.

People are motivated, family-oriented, and hard working everywhere. The farmers in my dad's village in Bangladesh certainly are all those things. But they labor within a society that taxes the productive and honest and periodically destroys any accumulated capital with chaos. An American applying that same labor produces a thousand times as much. The difference isn't the laborer, it's the machine against which he is laboring. That American system is the bequest of America's British and Dutch founders: Anglo law, social and political norms, and civic culture, and Anglo/Dutch views towards markets and commerce. The operating system of the country was largely in place by the early 19th century and it remains the thing most responsible for our present prosperity.

I don't say that to diminish immigrants. Because isn't even really a point about immigration. It's about correctly understanding the source of our own prosperity.

I wonder how much Russian propaganda worked its way into western academia over the 20th century? Very similar.

The post-1990 program is very different in scope. The 1947 rules provided for a six-month work eligibility that was granted to very few people: https://thepienews.com/us-launches-re-evaluation-of-opt/. Today, OPT is three years and granted to 300,000 people.

Yes, a Syrian immigrant who made it through the very strict immigration filters we had in place in the 1950s. (Also an odd example because Jobs had no contact with his father and was raised and socialized entirely by his American mother.)

It’s precisely because I’m an immigrant that I chafe at the narcissism of immigrants who want to overstate our contribution to the U.S. as it exists today. The U.S. was already a fully formed, technologically advanced superpower by the time my family got here in 1989. Desis like me came here because our effort goes a thousand times farther within the system—constitutional, legal, cultural, etc.—that Americans created than it does in the countries we created. We shouldn’t be blowing smoke up our own asses and pretending that we had more to do with it than we did. It’s obnoxious, diminishes the contributions of others, and is contrary to our own interest, because it gives us a false sense of what made America into such a place that we were willing to leave our family behind to come here.

Yes, the U.S. benefited from key foreign talent acquisitions like bringing over German scientists after World War I. The 1952 H-1 Act and some ad hoc programs brought over college professors and people like that. But “mass skilled immigration” in the form of H-1B, OPT, etc., didn’t happen until the early 1990s. We should evaluate these programs on their own terms, not link them into some grandiose fictional narrative. Especially now where AI is going to displace many knowledge workers.

You can’t see any change in the trend line in the mid 1980s: https://www.aei.org/economics/eu-vs-usa-part-v/. The growth slope for the U.S. has been very consistent since the early 1980s.

The DOJ prevailing wage certifications are a joke. The same people who say advertising a web developer job in the sunday paper is sufficient notice also say if what you’re paying for that web developer is market rate.

The wait time is long from the perspective of an individual immigrant (about 17 years for sibling preference for India, for example), but not that long from the perspective of population dynamics. A single skilled immigrant can bring over a dozen family members within 25 years. That's how you end up with these huge ethnic enclaves popping up all over the country in places that had very few immigrants when Al Gore was running for President.