Steve Sailer writes: “The New York Times editorial “Europe Should See Refugees as a Boon, Not a Burden” has not struck a chord with NYT readers. None of the top 30 or more Reader’s Pick comments are supportive.”
* I’m floored by this. I’ve seen anti-immigration comments land a lot of support in the NYT comment sections but always alongside some opposite progressive pro-immigration responses as well. I’ve never seen a solid wall of backlash like this.
* I’ve been paying attention to the immigration issue for years, and I’ve never seen the kind of emphatic opposition to mass immigration that we are now seeing. It will be interesting to see what coming elections in the US and Europe bring, and whether our leaders finally start listening to the citizens or whether they continue to find even more ways to blatantly ignore and undermine the will of the voters.
* Mexican immigrants to the US boost GDP, while dragging down GDP per capita. They benefit business owners and upper-middle-class people who want cheap nannies, while hurting people at the bottom end of the economic scale.
Arab Muslim immigrants to Europe are not only transparently shopping around for the countries with the most generous welfare payments, they actively want to destroy their host countries. Not only will Europe have to pay for cradle to the grave welfare, they’ll have to spend billions on security measures to keep them from blowing the place up. Letting them in is a disaster for everyone, including the wealthy.
* In this case I think it’s called “the collapse of traditional print newsmedia.”
Even Carlos Slim buying a hefty share of Grey Lady stock and pushing the editorial content and story development guidelines in the direction of his view of what’s Boonly (externalizing his lawless and stupid onto El Norte, and hectoring its beleaguered residents to see this as a good thing as their wages are attached to supply welfare dollars to pay for phone calls back to Mehico) doesn’t seem to be bailing the model out.
Meantime, those within that model are having a remarkably hard time comprehending their own irrelevancy to and disengagement with the rank and file.
Believe me, the MSM panic rooms are fuller by the moment. Between medium collapse and narrative collapse, it’s not at all clear how they’re going to keep the revenues propped up, particularly with talk of a Wall St. hard correction in the near future.
Hardening clickbait demographics works to some degree. (What, in this house, we call the “boobs, freaks, and Hitler” model of clickbait.)
But sites like Unz and Taki, blogs like Those Who Can See, JayMan, and VDARE, and “new right” outlets like Counter-Currents and Radix are leading even those who disagree with the “new right” to do a lot of rethinking and reframing of their own views.
Viewers/readers may still buy access to and read NYT…but NYT, like The Nation, The Atlantic, and that piece of crap Mother Jones are learning that the audience, not the medium, is the message.
> I’ve never seen the kind of emphatic opposition to
> mass immigration that we are now seeing.
Watching this electron cloud of rank and file opposition coalesce around lightning rods such as Mr. Sailer has been glorious indeed.
It has left me feeling that maybe AOHell and Zuckerberg couldn’t turn every last corner of the Internet into a combination shopping mall, porn palace, and infotainment clickbait currency mint. There are still niches where the awake and thinking and honestly dissenting can talk to one another.
What’s more transformative than people observing as that sort of dialogue proceeds? God knows the MSM don’t allow it. One doesn’t have to agree to benefit, and that’s what the old media don’t comprehend, but the Romans did 2,000 years ago: lockstep collapses bridges.
Who’s behind all that new media agora-disputation is another question. I like to think that for every Eye of Soros and Ford Foundation operative pushing the Stalinish MSM, there’s 1,000 “quarter-millionaires next door” funding these smaller information projects. You know, the kind of people the Founders had in mind as the ones who should be allowed to vote.
But there’s probably some super rich angels as well.
* At what point did the European countries realize they were being invaded? Last weekend? Yesterday? Will history look at the leaders’ initial open-border policy as the greatest lapse in historical memory recorded in modern times? Or just a spot of momentary insanity?
* Despite Hungary’s brave stand, basically nothing has changed. The refugees are being allowed to pass through Croatia, to Hungary, and then to Austria. 4000 arrived in Austria last night.
The problem is once they are inside Europe’s exterior perimeter, no nation wants to keep them on their territory nor send them back. No Balkan nation wants to become Europe’s “panic room” where all the refugees are stuffed into.
What this means is that despite the border clash theater in Hungary a couple days ago — nothing has changed and the flows have only been slightly diverted but not slowed down. The Balkan states say the problem has to be solved in Turkey and Greece which is actually correct since no one is man enough in Europe to collect these refugees and physically take them back to Turkey.
But the EU moves as slowly as a turtle. Germany and France have to get motivated to provide the required border protection in Greece and Turkey. They will drag their feet until the Eastern bloc nations accept forced quotas.
So this invasion is no where near containment. Even Hungary is wussing out a bit although they are being placed in a terrible position due to no fault of their own.
Knowing the pace of “action” by the EU, it will be months (if ever) before this invasion is stemmed — and at that point it will be too late to save a large part of Europe.
* I get maybe 25% of my comments to the NYT’s published. I’m usually heretical against the Narrative but not outright rude. So for everyone of these nicey-nice anti-immigration comments, you can well imagine there are plenty of others that don’t make it past the filters.
The Daily Telegraph has pretty much shut down comments. The Guardian very heavily censors. One place where I push a lot of limits is the Washington Post and so far I have not had a problem there. Seriously there are times I go overboard there and nothing ever happens. NRO is almost impossible for me, even if I don’t use the word “cuck” my comments there maybe last 3 minutes at best.
* Facebook isn’t a good venue for political discussions, especially if you’re college educated. There is too much signaling being done on Facebook that renders most exchanges inauthentic or phony.
* Facebook is an EXCELLENT resource for political discussions…if you know how to use it (and oddly, very few people seem to). What you do, is set up a Facebook Group, and then designate it as Private. You then fill up that Group with interesting people (ideally, no more than a couple dozen active posters), who can be trusted not to rat each other out in the event they do see something they dislike, and voila – no threat of censorship, and no idiots chiming in with PC nonsense. I’m in several private FB Groups (including one where one of the principal writers at this site is a member, for example), and the discussions that go on there are significantly better than even the commenting section at this fine website.
* The Washington Post seems to have a high tolerance for crime think comments. Might be Bezos doing. They still have limits though, during the case of the murdered wealthy DC family the comments came in fast & furious. Most were pretty racist blaming blacks for crime & some even advocated for segregation.
They turned off comments to most stories having to do with the case as a result. Same thing with that UVA girl that was murdered by a black guy.
* Economists talk all the time about opportunity cost … except when the topic is immigration.
* The strangeness associated with the Western “diversity” movement is the movement’s attempt to relativize and trivialize the issues of ethnic, cultural, and religious antagonisms that have historically led to social disruptions, civil wars, and mass migrations in the first place — Shiite vs. Sunni, Muslim vs. Hindi, Catholic vs. Protestant, Christian vs. Muslim, Christian vs. Jew, Africans vs. Europeans, English vs. Irish. You get the idea.
So, what makes the liberal SJWs believe that the “diversity” movement in Western European societies will succeed? The SJW “new world order”: A society intermixed with large populations of Shiites, Sunnis, Muslims, Hindi, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Black Africans, Europeans, Amerindians, etc., ad nauseam … all living peacefully together in a divinely ordained “Camp of Saints” while enjoying an explosion of ethnic restaurants, colorful dress, and new insights into foreign cultures. What are they thinking?
The reality is more common sense: The evolution of “no go” areas in Western European and North American cities; that is, Muslim communities in Great Britain and France run in accordance with Sharia Law with mutawa enforcing dress codes for women; “no go” areas for Whites in African-American, Hispanic, and North African communities (choose your continent); the trivialization of education as communities mandate “multicultural” perspectives in the classroom. Indeed, the “multicultural” perspective by its very nature assumes that all cultures are created equal and therefore there is no such thing as “civilization” that one generation passes to another.
What the SJWs miss is that culture is more than colorful dress and ethnic food. It governs a culture’s understanding of right and wrong; what is good and what is bad; the concept of what is lawful and unlawful; social interaction between the sexes; what is and is not acceptable dress; assumptions about how to raise children (or decide what is and is not child abuse); the roles that men, women, and children play in life. In short, a multicultural society quickly devolves into a “freak show” in which anything goes and nothing works … a Hobbesian nightmare in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, Chapters XIII–XIV). Ironically, the Syrians and Iraqis appear to know what this is about as they stampede to the “more civilized” culture of Western Europe to raise their families in safety.
Who knows? Perhaps someday the Whites in North America and Western Europe might be part of a new mass migration to somewhere else to escape the continual social strife and civil wars in their new “multicultural” societies.
* There’s a lot of sputtering incoherence in the NYT comments, indicating incipient rage. Interesting to note that a plurality of commenters oppose the refugees because they come from misogynistic and homophobic cultures, that might be a way to gain allies on the left. Also a number stress the anti-Semitism of the refugees, another way to gain allies.
I’m sure the NYT is looking at this in terms of the Irish, Italian and Jewish waves to the US, where xonophobic comments about them were common (The Germans didn’t have it so bad except for the WW1 anti-German mania, and the Chinese hysteria ca. Blaine’s candidacy is also relevant but the numbers were far smaller, not forgetting Japanese in WW2.) So NYT extrapolates and determines that all will be OK in the end.
Badfeels associated with the Euro Refugee crisis are probably being suppressed by NYT management because the association with Latino immigration to America are obvious, even though the Euro case is much worse.
This is turning into a classic lifeboat problem. Neither US nor EU are where they were 100, 150 years ago. The EU doesn’t have the room, or the resources, except artificially, and the US has the room, but doesn’t want the decline in quality of life that immigrant swarms will bring. Time to reconstruct Lady Liberty and take away the torch and replace it with a stop sign — or a weapon.
At the same time, lack of native population growth and economic growth as such is going to lead to more stratification in both EU and US, which explains the premium on IQ and education, since lack of growth equals a kind of serfdom or hereditary underclass.
* This is the end of the Left. That’s the core of this ongoing crisis, which will drag on for years and probably bring down a lot of societies. The social welfare state is based on the idea of human equality and the idea that social engineering can control human outcomes. This fantasy dominated the 20C; it is a religion to most Westerners, especially their vast bureaucracies. Mass non-Western immigration is exploding this paradigm, one country at a time. Sweden, the granddaddy of social democracies, is beginning to crack. If Swedes decide that their welfare state is actually just a generous nation state, its foundations shift fundamentally. Denmark is already there. This is the end of the Left.
* The doomer blogger Gail Tverberg, who was and maybe still is an actuary, calculated that half of GDP growth is simply population growth. The elites in Europe and the US are running a sort of ponzi scheme where assets are valued on the basis of “growth” in the future. But the growth requires an ever increasing population. If the native population reduces their family size, as has been happening in both the US and Europe (and which historically does happen over time as places become more crowded and the cost of living goes up), then more people will have to be imported. Its really that simple. A big problem for the European elites is that the nearby developing countries with exploding populations are in the Muslim Near East and sub-Sahara Africa, the US elites at least get to bring in Indians from the Andes and Central America.
The only two countries that I’m aware of where the government has a policy of getting the population down to a more sustainable figure are China and Japan. I wonder if this is an East Asian thing. The Indian government also tried in the 1970s and failed. In Japan low population growth/ population decline has translated directly into really low GDP growth numbers. They will have to go throw several generations who accomplish nothing much, not having the opportunities that come when the economy is growing, but at the end of the century will have a less crowded and less import dependent country that is still culturally Japanese. And people have noted that the “silent depression” in Japan hasn’t really reduced living standards, because with a smaller population there is more go to around per capita, but it probably has limited the numbers of Japanese billionaires.
* I think this is one of the few times where I have seen the top comments on more conservative publications closely match those on liberal sites. Us commoners are now calling out the media/politicians and their pathological altruist followers on this. Many commenters correctly note that most of the migrants are fit young men, yet the media acts like over half of them are comprised of women, children and the disabled.
* Chaim Amalek: Yes, and this is an important tool in their toolkit of social control. It isn’t so much that the elites who run our media (including the goy Jeff Bezos) care what this or that plebe has to say so much as they worry that by publishing such comments, masses of readers will reach certain conclusions that would be dangerous to the globalists. They do not want us to conclude that 1. they are not alone, but are perhaps more numerous and thus entitled to policies that reflect their views than the oligarchs want generally known, and 2. that it is possible to speak out, be read by others, and not vanish into a puff of smoke. But to really buttress democracy we shall need more than comments areas where people can hide behind fake names. We need a system of laws and legal defenses that protect Americans from getting fired simply for speaking out. And for that, the American worker needs the protection of UNIONS. Screw what you have heard about unions from the Ayn Rand worshipers of the RNC. The American worker needs a union.
