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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29321 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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This isn't just raw bigotry - a person who's learned to do honor culture sparring instead of acting 'reasonably' and signaling disapproval subtlely, who hasn't practiced doing paperwork or writing essays, who doesn't have a support network of other rich people to fall back on, will in practice be at a disadvantage in life, even if they're just as 'biologically' smart as a rich white person.

There is at least one company that attempts to teach intelligent but culturally backward people to do upper class signaling: Bloom School, formerly Lambda. They quite explicitly teach lower class people how to perform class signaling - an example Austin Allred (the founder) gave is that they tell everyone to get a bank account before getting hired, since "just cut me a check" signals low class. They internalize the benefits by charging customers a fraction of their paycheck assuming they get a job that pays at least $50k/year.

It's a popular target of dishonest hit pieces by left wing journalists, near as I can tell for exactly this reason. Journalists are high class, Bloom/Lambda students are low class, and yet Bloom graduates earn more than journalism school graduates.

As for the "why do Jews and Asians succeed then" question...When you're excluded from good occupations by law, your culture will steer away from them and towards unproductive activity or crime,

Every western state of the Union except Washington explicitly included Asians in Jim Crow laws. Southern states did not, probably because the vast majority of Asians lived in the west.

Montana: "Negroes, Chinese and Japanese"

Arizona: "Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu"

California, quite famously the location of lots of anti-Asian discrimination: "Negroes, mulattos, Mongolians and Malays"

Nevada was more descriptive about what these terms mean: "Ethiopian or black race, Malay or brown race, Mongolian or yellow race, or Indian or red race"

Oregon: "Negro, Chinese, or any person having one-quarter or more Negro, Chinese or kanaka blood, or any person having more than one-half Indian blood." (Kanaka = pacific islander.)

Utah: "white and Negro, Malayan, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon void."

Insofar as Asians were not explicitly mentioned in Jim Crow laws the courts generally would include them should the matter be tested. For example in California the law specified "no black, mulatto person, or Indian" and the California Supreme court interpreted it to include Chinese: "It can hardly be supposed that any Legislature would . . exclud[e] domestic negroes and Indians, . . . and turn loose upon the community the more degraded tribes of the same species, who have nothing in common with us."

https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state

get a bank account before getting hired, since "just cut me a check" signals low class.

Wait, is that backwards?

I'm guessing this has to do with the payday loans thing, which Scott has probably written a post about, I think? (Or at least linked to an article talking about such one time, pre-Substack.)

Oh hired, duh, and asking for cashable checks vs using direct deposit. I need a finishing school for retards.

What proportion of modern day Asian Americans are descended from the stock that lived under these laws and what proportion came after?

Wikipedia tells me that immigration picked up a lot after 1965, and pew research shows a population of only 980,000 in 1960 compared to 3.5 million in 1980, and 12 million in 2000, but I'm not American so I may be missing something obvious.

If the argument is that historical discrimination creates damaged cultures within certain races, the seemingly contradictory good behaviour of people of the same race who came after the discrimination ended isn't a refutation.

Wikipedia suggests no major waves of Japanese immigration to the US post Civil Rights Act. This suggests Japanese Americans are mostly long term residents who suffered segregation (and internment!) yet they don't exhibit any of the postulated dysfunction.

I wonder whether 2nd generation black immigrants (post-segregation) behave more like Chinese immigrants or those dysfunctional Japanese and Black Americans?

I remember the stories my father told of the Asian kids who went to school with him in the immediate aftermath of school desegregation, and the favorable contrast they drew to the local blacks, but anecdote.

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