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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   25128 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Erik Prince was on Tucker Carlson. It was nearly two hours, and I enjoyed most of it. They talked about Ukraine, the CIA, republicans, Afghanistan, drone warfare, surveillance, smartphones, and much more.

https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1792963714779426941

https://rumble.com/v4wl5or-erik-prince-cia-corruption-killer-drones-and-government-surveillance.html

Also youtube, somewhere.

I wanted to transcribe this part, and talk about it. Approximately 1:09.

EP: There's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American citizens.

TC: I agree with that completely, but an actual American, someone who grew up here.

EP: Fair. But the left has devalued American citizenship, it should mean something to be an American. I mean, a Roman citizen: it meant something.

TC: I mean a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, who was born in Western Michigan, so yes, I'm quite aware of that.

EP: Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.

TC: Yeah, you wonder if we've reached where that is impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.

EP: I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies, and corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people but it's still possible.

I have not been shy about voicing my thoughts on citizenship, so to hear them echoed in some part on a platform like this was interesting and unexpected.

What other societies is he talking about? I am most familiar with the Reconquest, where the mohammadeans were driven out of Iberia over centuries. That fits pretty well with what Prince is saying. I'm less familiar with the partition of India, by religion, then the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. This seems less relevant. What else is there? And what would that look like in the USA and Europe?

There's plenty to talk about from this conversation. The parts on drone warfare were particularly interesting to me, but didn't seem to fit with the rest of this post. And I'm out of time, so I post this as-is without any further commentary.

I really don't get why people go straight to ethnic cleansing. It's a political non-starter for one unless we're on the brink of collapse, and there is several steps in-between here and there that are much more reasonable. Every single larger european country used to be multiple regions & ethnicities that didn't really identify as one, and there are quite a few accidents of history which would have led to a very different structure; Burgundy as an independent entity, or a much larger (or smaller, or integrated) Austria, or a mostly-unified Scandinavia, and so on. That the current shape feels so "solid" was the result of a deliberate process of propaganda and suppression of minority identities. The only reason why we nowadays can be so laizze-faire with european minority identification is precisely because of this process. My mom didn't speak high german for example, only low german, but was bullied in school even by the teachers until she could speak "proper" german. My parents only taught high german to me. And this obviously was toward the far end, both in time and in tameness, of the process.

There is so much we can change; We can tie welfare to much more stringent requirements, enforce a common language, or for a more extreme option we can require extensive civil/military service with explicit statements of loyalty. And there's even some "positive" actions still lacking; For example, I personally know an arabic guy who fell into alcoholism bc he was literally not allowed to work for multiple years due to his legal status, and he wasn't willing to engage in illegal work (in itself a laudable quality, even if it arguably was wrong in this case!). Many of the more extreme options will probably result in some levels of emigration, but that's still very different than forcibly removing people of which a decent percentage would likely have been willing to adjust.

It's a political non-starter for

Supposedly, mass deportations are broadly popular (~50% would approve of) in the US and Western Europe.

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/25/trump-biden-americans-illegal-immigration-poll

"Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants" is considerably different from "Mass deportation of immigrants and their descendants in general".

Yes, but once you've done the former, the latter is much easier to do. There are serious amounts of immigrants who behave in unacceptable way, for example the notorious criminal families in Germany.

Or people who are fond of marching in Germany with Turkish flags, and so on.

I really don't get why people go straight to ethnic cleansing.

If we stopped giving welfare to immigrants, absurd NGO charities, legal protections, etc., most would self-deport overnight. Is that ethnic cleansing?

Depends quite a bit on the particulars, but in general terms no. As I wrote:

Many of the more extreme options will probably result in some levels of emigration, but that's still very different than forcibly removing people of which a decent percentage would likely have been willing to adjust.

As long as you give people the option to adjust, the requirements are clearly aimed toward creating a sustainable state with citizens that hold a shared identity and they are reasonably attainable for the great majority of people, them leaving out of their own accord is not meaningfully "ethnic cleansing" in my view. The change can obviously still be bad in many other ways, though.

How about stopping welfare full stop? It fixes so many things...

Most welfare is welfare-for-the-old, not welfare-for-the-poor. Westerners find the Indian alternative to welfare-for-the-old a lot less attractive than just ponying up on tax day.

  • Social Security: 5.5% of GDP
  • Medicare: 3.2% of GDP
  • Not having your demented mother-in-law around the house: Priceless

There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's the fiat currency printing press.

Not having your demented mother-in-law around the house: Priceless

A simple question then: Why would you marry your wife then if you can't stand your mother in law? Sounds like the western courtship and mate selection process has some issues if mother in law problems are so common. Remember when you marry someone you're not just choosing your spouse but rather you're choosing your inlaws too. We also have lots of mother in law issues in our cultures to the point that the wife/mother in law tussle is one of the staples soap writers use for their dramas, but it's never seen as OK to throw out your elders and generally eventually people find a compromise all the parties are happy with.

Plus your children will get 25% of their DNA from your mother in law, which means they'll probably be somewhat like her. Choosing a mother in law you dislike is indirectly choosing your children to be more predisposed towards traits you dislike compared to a mother in law you like.

Also you do realise that some day you will be the parent in law getting booted out of the family home to be "cared for" by strangers, yes?

All this reminds me of the opining lines to Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans":

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop!” I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”

Plus your children will get 25% of their DNA from your mother in law, which means they'll probably be somewhat like her.

Assuming these undesirable traits are not in your wife, that means that they probably will have less than 25% of any DNA associated with the traits, or more likely, the traits are just learned and not genetic.

The issue here and where the anti-immigration people will fundamentally disagree with you is you assume the issue with immigrants is mostly cultural assimilation and not biological assimilation. It’s assuming if you suppress minority culture they will turn into good Protestant Americans. Biological assimilation is still possible but requires even more extreme measures. Germany is quite dull today. We wiped out an entire generation of their fighting men. Central America similar went thru a big filter with the Spanish. I believe England was executing something like 1% of their lower class for a long time. One theory of Ashkenazi is the ethnicity faced strong selection pressure for entering the merchant class and thus selecting for IQ. There are processes to biologically assimilate a people, but in the modern world that is an order of magnitude more extreme. The U.S. too this day has failed to assimilate the African American population.

Genetic engineering could be a potential solution in the near future.

The U.S. too this day has failed to assimilate the African American population.

Americans spent centuries taking strong and specific action to keep the races separate and thus specifically prevent assimilation. The Latin American countries were considerably more successful in assimilating the slavery-descended populations to the general population.

The Latin American countries were considerably more successful in assimilating the slavery-descended populations to the general population.

And yet, the Mexican supreme court looks like this.

Is assimilation merely white supremacy?

If one of them had, say, 5 % of African-derived ancestry, would you know it? That's what assimilation largely meant in the Latin American context.

The genetic mix that went into the creation of Mexico was likely something like 30-70% in favor of natives, no ?

I was talking specifically about Africans.

Americans spent centuries taking strong and specific action to keep the races separate and thus specifically prevent assimilation.

And then when they stopped trying to keep them separate, whites were ethnically cleansed from the centers of what used to be world-class cities. Assimilation did not happen, but ethnic cleansing of white people did.

Buying mansions in the DFW suburbs is now considered ethnic cleansing? Also, there are tons of white people walking around Manhattan. The whites seemed to have rebounded well from the genocide.

  • -11

Most of the people living in the DFW suburbs had not previously been living in Dallas proper; they moved to the area.

This has some excerpts from Kevin Purcell's book. There used to be a more complete version online but I can't find it any more.

https://www.dismantleacademia.org/life-and-death-in-philadelphia.html

It's the story of his childhood in Philly where it started as a the type of streetcar suburb that everyone on youtube wants to build these days. It's walkable, there are parks and playgrounds and groups of neighborhood kids stay out playing baseball until well after dark. As black people start to move in it becomes less and less safe. At first they have to go to the parks in groups to stay safe and then later it's not possible to go there at all. There are gangs, break ins and eventually murder. His parents sell their house at a loss to move the kids somewhere safe.

Honestly I was just fired up about the phrase “ethnic cleansing”. Felt like such an insane phrase to use for people moving to the suburbs.

  • -10

Nobody gets fired up about a similarly charged phrase for people moving to the suburbs, when that phrase denigrates those doing the moving rather than those providing the impetus to move. I refer, of course, to "white flight".

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But not an insane phrase to use for cohesive communities being destroyed by newcomers who inflict wildly disproportionate, racially-organized lawless violence on them, with the tacit support and approval of institutional actors. That most of the community members escape with their lives by promptly fleeing, losing their community and much of their wealth and resources in the process, does not change the fundamental nature of the situation. Nor does that nature change when the fleeing is conducted under color of law, through sale of their property.

And, key to the ethnic cleansing claim, the authorities let it be known they've been told not to stop the violent blacks from terrorizing the whites.

That's not what he's referring to.

While the theory about how medieval executions drove a certain kind of evolution is cute and somewhat plausible, I consider it far from proven. If you asked me numbers, I'd say 20% to be true in broad terms, 40% to be true directionally but too weak pressure to be notable, and 40% to be just wrong. There is also the problem that executions have been a mainstay of cultures everywhere. As I remember, the relevant paper was OK in terms of "this is a theory, and it somewhat fits with some available evidence" but bad in terms of "this theory is actually significantly better than competing theories".

Much more plausible to me is simply that the cradle of humanity from which most non-africans descend was a pretty strong bottleneck with, among other things, multiple neurology-related mutational sweeps. Secondly the civilisational band of europe - middle east - asia has exerted pro-civilisation pressure over literal millenia, and from the available evidence the centre of highest development has changed multiple times. The problem with arabs really isn't biology, the moment they bother to assimilate they're pretty good citizens. That argument applies much more to (sub-saharan) africans, which still are a pretty small minority here.

In addition, I happen to be a pretty strong proponent of genetic engineering anyway.

Arabs have a genetically low IQ today because extremely high rates of cousin marriage drive down their intelligence(a side effect of Islam). Arab Christians have IQ scores on par with north-western Europe. It’s not implausible that ancient middle easterners had IQ more similar to Europeans than to their modern descendants.

I’ve been led to believe, perhaps falsely, that this should only account for about 5 IQ points. I suspect (not epistemically well-founded) that the Christian non-Ashkenazi Jewish IQ advantage in the Middle East could derive partially from wealthier, more educated segments of society being more resistant to conversion (like recusants in England). Middle Eastern Christians sects and Jews (and maybe Druze, Yazidis, other religious groups? I’m not too familiar) always strike me as resembling unusually large, Indian-style jātis

There’s probably a lot of factors behind Maronites having the highest IQ in the Levant, including Jews as a whole(although not if you split out ashkenazim). Recusants being wealthier is probably a factor too, but I think the cousin marriage effect is exaggerated by generations upon generation of inbreeding. There might also be a factor of women being more resistant to conversion with intelligence, in particular, due to Islam having a deserved reputation for treating women more poorly than Christianity.

In addition, I happen to be a pretty strong proponent of genetic engineering anyway.

I too very strongly support genetic engineering. However I expect that even if we did this the low grade whites left wouldn't be partcularly happy about the enhanced negro who is now better than them and starts taking his new rightful place in society. I expect they will still complain just as much about that state of affairs as they do about the current one (much like how they complain today about black Nigerian Elites).

And even if you raised these whites to the same level as the upgraded blacks the complaining still wouldn't stop. What were litanies against people sucking on the welfare teat will become jeremiads against the minorities driving wages down.

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