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The ongoing riots in the UK and the senseless destruction they have caused remind me of Bertold Brecht's famous poem he wrote in response to the 1953 East Germany strikes. While Brecht, himself a communist sympathizer, initially intended his poem to be a satirical polemic about heavy handed work quotas it recently struck me that he might have been more correct than even he had anticipated.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "to dissolve" as "to become dissipated or decomposed". After seeing the behaviour of the rioters right now as well as the rhetoric that has been coming from that class of people over the last few decades one must wonder if the right solution isn't really to dissolve the people. By this I don't mean immersing them in sulphuric acid until dissolution but rather dissipating their population density as a fraction of the whole country until there is no longer enough of a critical proportion of people which can light the fuse so to speak. There's a reason why even though there are far more "natives" in London than Sunderland the violence in the former has been more chickenhearted and more easily put down.
These rioters are generally low human capital people who take out a lot more over the course of their life than they put in. It's not scientists and lawyers you see giving the middle finger to police officers and pushing garbage bins in their general direction. I think it is perfectly fair to say that as a group they are best characterized as failures who have disappointed their betters and what's more don't even think there is anything wrong with their current state and behaviour. They are even confused and disoriented about the flashpoint of the current disorder: unlike what their prejudices told them the person who killed the three girls in Southport was not a fresh off the boat Muslim migrant but rather a black Welsh 17 year old child who had been born in the UK having a schizo moment. The true facts about the stabbing coming out did not placate their desire for an orgy of violence in the least.
Furthermore they live off the tax contributions of people like me and instead of being thankful for what they are given they blame us for making the country worse and want to bleed us even more. I like to quip that if the majority of people want to see a human parasite they would be better served by looking in the mirror instead of the Times Rich List and I think that applies perfectly here.
Another good example of a city that had some riots is Manchester; when the thugs tried their trade there they were met with swift counter protests bigger than what they could muster and were forced to disperse, leading to no public damage. It appears that the violence only really gets out of hand in the minor cities where the concentration of "natives" is too high. To prevent future riots the obvious solution is to reduce this concentration or namely, to dissolve the people.
Whenever there is dissolution there must be a solvent. And what would make the best solvent here? The usual answer provided by the left is something like "integration" where rich and well off people are asked to live amongst the lower classes in the hope that they will have a civilizing effect on the poors. Normally this is done by mandating the building of housing intended for poor people very close to housing occupied by the well off. While this may work at preventing tantrums from being thrown in the first place it won't do very much to quell them if they happen: a bunch of effete button pushers (Note: I count myself as among this group) doesn't put the fear of God into anyone. They would never have the guts to go up to the rioters and do this (choice moment: the rioter responding with 2 fingers when asked how many brain cells he has).
Instead the best solvent you can get is someone who will also stand up to debauchery when it rears its ugly head: migrants who are unafraid of giving it just as good as they get (see above video). And what's more, unlike the low tier "natives" who Great Britain is saddled with because they were born here the non-natives are all people who were either themselves selected by the UK as being positive for the country or descendants of such people which means they still have a portion of the net positive genetics (I'm ignoring refugees here because they make up a very small proportion of total migrants and something tells me the rioters of today wouldn't be happy if illegal migration stopped but legal migration continued at the same levels as today).
In fact a more reasonable word for these migrants would be "elects", since they are the chosen. Each and every single legal migrant in the UK has been collectively chosen as being worthy of being allowed into the country. They should be accorded the respect such an honour deserves instead of being told that they don't belong here. In fact the reason so many of them were chosen in the first place is because the "natives" have continued to disappoint the real decision makers day in day out for the last however many decades where importing so many migrants was the only choice left to keep a stable state going: firstly refusing to take care of older family members and foisting them onto the state and then refusing to have enough children if they're net contributors/having too many children if they aren't net contributors. Any attempt to talk sense to these people about how a welfare state with sub replacement birth rates and no migration is unsustainable was (and is) met with fingers in ears and "na-na-na can't hear you". Is it any surprise that with such a badly behaved lower class the elites decided to do away with them like you do with a bad employee and get someone new?
And we shouldn't forget that many of the migrants had far worse starting conditions than the gentlemen throwing bricks but through industry and positive sum contributions to human flourishing have managed to make something of themselves, only to be looked at enviously by the people who previously have been appropriating the wealth of the successful and now want to get even more at the elects' expense.
So yes, the elite class in the Western world has taken Bertold Brecht's words to heart. When confronted with unruly and disruptive lower classes it really is simpler for them to dissolve the people and elect another. I for one am looking forward to the consummation of this process; we'll probably end up with fewer riots at least.
I'm trying to figure out on what proportions this actually describes your beliefs, amounts to an instance of trying a different belief on for size, and is an exercise in tricking the resident contrarians into vigorously defending the polar opposite viewpoint. Either way, the statement about fewer riots at least seems baseless - I actually happened to be in London in 2010?11? when the minorities were rioting, and it still looked more serious than the pictures we are seeing now.
Let me try to guess what's going on here? There's a really obnoxious bait-and-switch that white supremacists tend to do (it's really important here to emphasize "supremacist"). Everything is at first justified through the lens of something like meritocracy or "master morality ---look at how inferior these examples of other races are, or look how "multiculturalism" is just "slave morality" where the strong are forced to support weak parasites (since Nietzsche is on everyone's mind again from the recent ACX post) .
However, when push comes to shove, it becomes very clear that their true motivation is not any kind of meritocracy or "master morality" at all---it's just wanting the members of the group they're part of to have increased status for the sole reason of having been born into that group. This is of course decidedly anti-meritocratic.
Posts like the OP's are a great way to highlight this contradiction (I tried something similar with this question posted on the old site). If you're actually going to judge some people as superior to others because of their achievement and greatness, no reasonable judgement is going to come out the way white supremacists (and racialists more generally) say it will. It really emphasizes that they have no basis for their positions besides naked, defecting-in-the-prisoner's-dilemma selfishness.
Of course, all the liberals hate the argument because you're judging some people as inherently worth more than others and all the racial conservatives hate it because the judgement is actually by merit instead of what they want: arbitrarily putting the group they were born into on top. See also the Nietzsche article's description (section X) of why everyone gets mad a Richard Hanania despite him being the only actual "honest-to-goodness Nietzschean master moralist".
In summary, think of this as "Ok, Mr. white supremacist, I'll grant you your stated motivation that we should follow some kind of 'master morality' and judge some people as superior and therefore of greater worth than others, let's see where that actually takes us. Oh, it should actually make you sound like Richard Hanania, supporting skilled immigration and all, instead of whatever you are. You really don't have any grounding in your policy preferences besides naked selfishness in favor of your birth group do you?". Whether the OP actually believes that you should rank people this way is less interesting.
This explanation doesn't match reality. In the US and the UK, many minorities have incomes which far exceed those of the main genetic stock. And there is very little outrage about this. To a first approximation, no one is mad about all the Asians and Jews who came to America and immediately vaulted to the top of the status ladder.
People are angry about the immigrants who commit crimes and just make the country a shittier place generally.
Sometimes, it really is that simple.
It really isn't just this, however deeply I wish it were. I encourage you to try writing something defending skilled immigration on this forum and see what sorts of responses you get.
One our mods is a skilled migrant from India and his posts about his struggle get massive upvotes.
Oh hi, I was just looking at this absolute clusterfuck of a situation after arriving in Scotland and wondering whether it was worth wading in while jet-lagged
You're right. I've written many a word about my desire to emigrate from India, and I would say that almost 95% of the feedback I've gotten was supportive. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the support of pseudonymous strangers on this niche internet forum made a great deal of difference, especially when I was at my lowest.
I would say that people are more inclined to be nice and welcoming to me than the modal immigrant. I'm well spoken, clearly preferring the way most of the Anglosphere or the West works to the point I decry most aspects of my own country and, as @Forgotpassword points out, a medical professional is a rather sympathetic figure. How many people want fewer doctors around? (The answer is existing doctors, but their power only goes so far).
I hardly think the West or its denizens are literally perfect, but they're still a gross improvement over how I've spent most of my life, and a very important difference between me and the Count is that I don't bite the hand that feeds.
I have absolutely no desire to see the West become more like like the Subcontinent. I'd rather not see a flood of unskilled immigrants bring the welfare system to its knees, or cause a breakdown of the religious tolerance and high trust a place is known for. I'm perfectly content with the existing British elite, and were they to gradually admit foreigners into their ranks, I'd much rather they be westernized by the time they hold power rather than nakedly bringing in the mores and behaviors of their home nations.
All I can really say is that people are a great deal more welcoming to a would-be immigrant when they're not actively sneering at them. Of course, Count makes a great deal more money than I do and is effectively unimpeachable thanks to Western norms of freedom of speech, so the reader is welcome to decide who's in the right here, or who is being rewarded for it. I just consider it an immense privilege to be let in here in the first place, and I'd rather not make people regret that decision.
This comment makes me vaguely uncomfortable.
On one hand, sure, someone who has such a deep level of contempt for a large percentage of a country's population probably should not be welcomed into that country. However large of a salary they earn, they're not going to be contributing positively to the welfare of people they more-or-less think are subhuman.
On the other hand, immigrants that do positively contribute on net in all aspects of society (i.e. not just monetarily) deserve to be welcomed. From the inside view of an individual person, it's morally commendable to always be grateful for what you have and not think you deserve anything. However, from an outside view, you shouldn't expect that high moral standard from others who do actually deserve the welcome.
And sometimes its just so satisfying to see white supremacist rhetoric about certain groups turned back on them this eloquently. The whole idea of judging large classes of people as subhuman and worthless is absolutely despicable, but sometimes you just want to say, "ok fine, I'm done with this, let's just accept your premise that we should do so. Wow, the 'worthless' groups aren't actually who you thought they were. Look at that, guess it's not such a good idea for you after all".
Why would it make you vaguely uncomfortable? As far as I'm concerned self_made_human's attitudes are perfectly valid, and should really be the norm for all immigrants. Is it the deference for white people that makes you feel uncomfortable?
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Alternatively, your moral resistance to racism observably diminishes so long as it's aimed at the "correct" race. Suppose the Count is wrong on the particulars, and an examination of the statistics reveals that, in fact, migrants in the UK are "worse", by whatever standards you are now flirting with, than the native underclass (and note the obvious dishonesty of comparing all immigrants to only the worst of the natives). If it turns out the natives are in fact better, does that mean the white supremacists had a point all along, or does it just prove that your entire interest in the topic begins and ends with its utility toward bashing the outgroup?
Between this and the luria-posting last week, Hlynka continues to age like fine wine.
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