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Does essentially entirely creating that "American culture" not automatically make them "anything special" in it? Do you also entirely deny HBD and thus believe that solely culture determines destiny?
No and no.
I believe American culture is the best in the world. This is a combination of memetic fitness, core values, and adaptability. Over the last 200 years we’ve refined the model, integrated countless populations, and been rewarded for it.
The fact that my ancestors were floating around Low Country South Carolina while this was happening doesn’t entitle me, personally, to the rewards. Instead it’s my willingness to play the game and to do my part at enforcing cultural norms—as well as refining them. For my efforts, I will earn a comfortable salary, a safe place to live, and advantages for my kids. In my opinion, this ought to be true whether I’m an Nth-generation gringo or a 1st-gen (legal!) immigrant.
I will mildly deny HBD in that I don’t believe a few IQ points matter as much as culture. How many of the Irish immigrants lost some potential due to malnutrition? We managed to incorporate them just fine. Differences in distributions are not enough to overcome the meritocratic and individualistic effects of our culture. Eroding those traits would handicap us—which is why I will do my part to keep them alive.
America wins when it integrates the best, regardless of their origins.
We've integrated countless White populations and maybe some East Asians. (And I don't even know if we've even integrated them all that well per se or if their natural expression of their culture is just so generally unobtrusive that it hardly matters. It seems to me like a large portion of them still prefer kimchi or whatever to burgers but they're mostly so quiet about it nobody cares.)
Americans of African descent still, for the most part, live in an entirely different world/culture (and that's not for lack of trying on the part of everyone else). They are not very well integrated at all, quite literally "ghettoized" in most cases (and given the state of these ghettos, that's probably a good thing), other than that many White Americans tend to like to scavenge their exotic cultural products to play act (well play at first anyway, mask becomes your face, etc.) primitiveness (and also some of them are pretty good at moving balls around). And many if not most of them don't seem to want to be integrated any more than they are either (other than into more government funding), deriding America's values as "acting [derogatorily] White".
Latinos are a mixed bag (unsurprising given that their whole ethnicity is genetically quite mixed), but in my experience even the very light-skinned, well-integrated ones tend to have a heavy degree of lingering affiliation to either "la raza" or their particular ethnic group, even as they sometimes try to identify as White. (This obviously does not include Hispanics of genuinely 100% European origin who are of course fully White, though nowadays even they often get confused by the common conflation between Latino and Hispanic or even intentionally try to blur the lines for woke points.)
Muslims resent us for tempting and corrupting them and we resent them for not being tempted and corrupted enough (plus the whole terrorism stuff).
Indians practice notorious nepotism in the industries they infiltrate, promoting their fellow Indians according to caste/relation etc. with basically zero scruples. (See the recent explosion in Indian tech CEOs which doesn't seem to be explicable any corresponding explosion in managerial ability among them.)
I could go on. Even native Hawaiians harbor heavy racial animus towards White Americans.
And you will notice that none of the above groups are particularly either. They all tend to be much more ethnically/racially tribal than White (especially left-wing ones), which takes precedence over merit for them in most cases.
Quick thought experiment: If group A generally practices "meritocratic individualism", tending to elevate individuals from any group including if not especially those outside of their own if it is warranted, and group B generally practices it far less, tending more to elevate members of their own group regardless of merit, which group do you think wins out in the long run? And what do you think happens to Group A's norms of "meritocratic individualism" after?
Can you name one non-White group that's actually been fully integrated on the level of Italians or Irish people (or even earlier Germans), that is to the point where they basically entirely lost the status of ethnic minority over time due to being so heavily integrated with the majority (and are now considered a part of it)? I don't think it exists (unless you count Jews, who are in an ambiguous category in regards to Whiteness, though that's starting to be undone more and more as many people begin to commit the high crime of )))noticing((().
Really? Assuming your "I" is somewhat generic here, do you actually think that immigration as practiced in modern America has raised wages/made salaries more comfortable, made the country safer, and offered advantages to children?
Do you believe that dozens might matter? Since that's what we're talking about in some cases, particularly in regards to immigration from Africa.
Since you're considering the "last 200 years", how do you account for the fact that up until 1965 it was essentially an explicit policy/goal of the American establishment to maintain a White majority in the country with its immigration policies (and even Hart-Celler could only be passed by proffering lies that it would not affect the status of that majority)?
Implicit if not explicit at times White nationalism has been, for most of American history (and arguably for the most dramatically and not necessarily certainly successful parts of it, the parts where an unsure frontier nation was called upon to pull itself up by its bootstraps and civilize a continent, as opposed to a rainbow coalition of humanity inheriting an already made no-assembly-required empire), a part of its "core values". Or are only the modern ones any good?
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