by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-24 07:55:51+00:00
I don’t really understand your framing here. I haven’t tricked you, you just misunderstood what I was referring to. Like it’s fine that you misunderstood, perhaps I wasn’t entirely clear in my writing, but you are acting as if I’ve somehow taken advantage of you and I’m very confused about that.

I have not assumed anything about what premises you’ve accepted. I am just expressing my theory on what to me also appears to be illogical and inconsistent behavior on the part of Trump supporters. I am basically saying “yes, actually Trump supporters are probably subconsciously racist”, which is not really a controversial take among Trump detractors, it’s just less of a low analysis drive by than those takes normally are.

If a group of people is subconsciously racist, then it makes logical (not moral) sense for them to support the candidate who sounds angry about things that are adjacent to that.

I don’t think I’ve yet expressed my own personal opinion on whether demographic change (“slide” from the perspective of people who oppose it) is an issue or the worst issue. It seems like you are arguing with whatever archetype you have bucketed me as in your head and not with me as an actual human. I am probably doing the same with you, to some extent, and it is probably common in these sorts of discussions (“tribalism”), but you are strongly doing it and I think you seem like you wouldn’t want to do it.

I don’t believe I am subconsciously racist. However, I am consciously skeptical about the grand experiment of mixing together people from all over the world. Now I know we were told since we were tiny that this is perfect and pure and good, but once you strip that away it’s basically underpants gnome logic. It’s never happened before in human history. Democracy in general barely works, I don’t really get why everyone is like “yeah we can just take people from anywhere, tell them they don’t really need to assimilate to the local culture, that’s outdated, and their descendants will still come out having our same democratic/egalitarian values”. Like, I would be very, very happy if that worked out. But, there is no way to know that it will. Is that a racism first narrative? Is that a hill I’m dying on? Is that an obviously foolish perspective?

It would be one thing if the same thing were happening in parallel in Asia and Africa and we were all just like, coming together in unison, man. But that is not happening. So if the experiment fails, it fails for us in the west, only. That seems, well, quite risky if you care about whether your grandchildren will still have a good place to live.

The reason you feel like you do about this issue and are, like most people, unable to have a level headed discussion about it, is not your fault. It’s because you were morally brainwashed as a child that this stuff is evil, even though like every American in 1915 (for example) thought this way and we generally don’t consider them to be evil in retrospect. And there has been no great scientific advancement since then to show us that everyone is the same when it comes to executing the functions of our societal structure (which is not itself universal, of course, and I don’t think anyone progressive would claim that it is, it is highly contingent). I was brainwashed too, I am just autistic enough to have mostly uninstalled it. If you can think through this area enough, the pain of entertaining related ideas eventually goes away and you realize that it was a constructed boogeyman the whole time. And you don’t become Hitler in the process, because Hitler was actually just factually wrong in his understanding of the world.