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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Americas Bad Cities are costing you

This is where Cremieux goes through the loss of agglomeration effects due to American cities being awful low density places. The loss of the American City he largely blames on the Great Migration and the associated crime waves. He then goes thru how white flight has mostly only occurred with black populations especially ADOS and occurs less with immigrants from Africa.

One of the things with woke is it made people think about ways to refute their ideas. One of them is that white people just hate black people so they did white flight. Turns out the data and original source material people started to look rediscover showed a rise in crime before white flight. People accepted those narratives for decades because we had already mitigated the costs and it was just easy to go with the old narratives. We also accepted a narrative that Americans just liked to live in the suburbs. The actual answer for the preference is crime was too high in cities.

The costs of mitigation Cremieux lists is likely not the full costs. It’s likely everything about city design has been done to allow for unofficial segregation. Often this has been done thru zoning to keep prices high. High home prices means high prices for everything in safe cities as your working class either needs to be able to buy housing in the community or compensated for a long community.

Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.

Today we talk about foreign migration and not domestic internal migration. Once you do mass migration you can’t unring tbe bell. You are now stuck with new demographics. In the case of the great migration I think it basically destroyed Americans urban environments. And now American cities suck. And we had to convince ourselves that we loved living in the suburbs instead of the suburbs being a mitigation for good schools/safety.

I am also open minded that the Great Migration led to increased American wealth because people opposed sharing economic resources and it had a macro effect of limiting socialism in the US and the political paths Canada/Europe went down.

One of them is that white people just hate black people so they did white flight. Turns out the data and original source material people started to look rediscover showed a rise in crime before white flight.

Still feels a bit close to accepting the premise that an approved reason is required of white people to live where they want.

Freedom of association: if white people did move simply because they hated black people, *shrug*. Their home, their choice. After all, it’d be their loss, as they’d be the ones missing out on the hustle and bustle of black vibrancy. And surely black people would be better off without racist pales and stales around.

Who/whom: When white people move-in somewhere and the previous residents move out, it’s heckin unwholesome gentrification where the Replaced are the victims.

This is America. Land of opportunity. So yes you need an “approved” reason to reject a population. And even then it’s hard to reject a person because their tribe is on net bad and you need to judge them as individuals.

I’ve heard of white flight since I was a kid in the 90’s and it was always associated with crime.

Crime was undoubtedly a factor, but I think public school integration and the ham-fisted, obviously harmful way it was ordered implemented by the Supreme Court (putting aside the separation of powers overreach in that), was really the thing that started the mass exodus. You can avoid crime to a large degree even in a high-crime city by knowing where it is and is not safe to go, and when, but you couldn't (and in many places still can't) avoid sending your kids to a dysfunctional urban public school unless you got them into - and could afford - private school.

My family is Southern, and it’s very clear that class has a huge affect on the desegregation experience. My boomer relatives who integrated with middle class or above blacks typically described the experience either positively or, more commonly, neutrally. My boomer relatives that had the experience of integrating lower class blacks universally hated the experience. Lots of violence and sexual harassment once you reached high school.

Yes, this probably would have worked, broadly, but would not have achieved full integration due to the larger class disparity between blacks and whites. The Supreme Court therefore mandated the worst thing possible, bussing kids from low-class black neighborhoods into middle-class white neighborhoods and vice versa. The outcome was entirely predictable.

Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.

I think this is not such a novel idea. The acceptance of car culture in USA was to large part driven by the fact that owning a car or two was middle class signifier and defensive measure. I think Europeans will eventually learn the same - if your rich neighborhood is one subway station away from crime ridden hellhole, you will have that spilled into your subway station and from there into the neighborhood. In that sense being cut off from public transit is the logical thing to require. We already see the same pattern in European cities, where natives flee to the surrounding towns and villages.

In that sense being cut off from public transit is the logical thing to require.

Hence why Georgetown is the least publicly accessible neighborhood in DC, despite being the wealthiest and most left-wing part of the entire city, physically very close to the heart of downtown, and full of carless university students.

It's not a transit desert; it's a transit moat.

It's the same reason why the bygone tramway/streetcar network of London was never extended to anywhere near the Westminster and Kensington districts.

The loss of the American City he largely blames on the Great Migration and the associated crime waves.

I imagine that it was a significant factor, but I don't know if largely blaming it is justified. My understanding is that suburbanization was already moving fast in the 1950s, when US violent crime rates were quite low. And the rate of suburbanization did not accelerate much in the 1960s and 1970s compared to the 1950s, even though violent crime rates began moving up sharply in the 1960s.

It would be interesting to find detailed data on suburbanization by year to compare to violent crime rates by year.

It’s likely true that suburbanization was increasing as cars became viable but I think it’s also fair that city crime and decline of amenities also encouraged suburbanization. Some % of the population would have preferred to remain in cities if the QOL in cities had not declined.

University of Chicago is probably the most obvious area where declining QOL prevented the formation of an industrial cluster around the university.

Most things do have multi-factors but I do think declining QOL significantly accelerated the move to suburbs.

I dunno.

I could believe that suburbanization depressed prices in inner cities, which proceeded to attract the kinds of people who can afford them, and that has a feedback loop where the presence of said people depresses the prices ("gentrification" works both ways).

The difference back in the '40s-'90s was that very cheap new technology (and a massive domestic manufacturing base) made building outwards attractive, and building outwards was still perfectly legal, so everyone except the very poor could afford to do it (and at that point, out of sight, out of mind). Evaporative cooling in the lower priced areas occurred. And then the demand for low-skill labor started drying up in the late '70s.

(One notes that once there's nothing for an unemployed man to do, he will turn to sex work- which for men is waging war- and if there is no organization willing or able to point him at a foreign enemy he will simply start a civil war at home, or "turn to crime" for short.[1, 2])

One might even point out that, if that is true, that suburbanization led to desegregation. City people are notoriously authoritarian more or less out of necessity- the number of people affected by poor behavior is drastically higher, compounded with there being far more poor per square mile.

So as normal people increasingly left for new land, they found that they didn't need to defend themselves from the [urban] poor any more (and further are now subject to other selection effects: that people who look like the urban poor, who make it out to the suburbs, are as far away from "urban poor" as you can get).

Naturally, with far less exposure to them, one would naturally be more sympathetic to the notion [that "looks like an urban poor" and "is an urban poor" are incompatible], and so as soon as they solidify as a voting bloc they will use that as a weapon and claim that people who are using the easiest, lowest-information proxy for who is urban poor are morally corrupt for doing so (or "racist" for short).

Which is easy to say, when the moral hazard is in your favor.

[1] Especially when a government agency is selling an incredibly cheap war-enhancing drug to those men rather than financing an expeditionary force to fight such a war themselves, perhaps contra Iran?

[2] One will also note that "fighting a civil war at home" is specifically what a very famous part of American law is meant for; the urban poor are exercising their rights appropriately. This fact makes a lot of people uncomfortable and led to a bunch of hysteria, mostly about "assault handguns". The right to do this is important specifically because it makes a threat clear: alienate a population because the Chinaman is a better worker than the domestic urban poor, and the urban poor have the right and responsibility to make you pay for it. Unfortunately for the urban poor, anyone who could organize a proper resistance... all left for the suburbs (or got killed themselves).

City people are notoriously authoritarian more or less out of necessity

Have you, uh, been downtown in a US city in the past ten years?

So, about that.

One notes that, for the last 50 years, "Muhrasism" was the room temperature in which one raised one's children. Again, mostly championed by the people who no longer had to deal with the urban poor.

Now these people, born and raised in the [technically, pagan] religion of Muhrasism (which they brought with them, just like Italians brought the Mafia, and it functions the same way), are back in the city- because they can't afford to live elsewhere.

They're not wealthy enough to pay the penalty for blasphemy against this religion (one notes the current blasphemers are "responsible for a significant chunk of space architecture" and "wrote a stupendously successful series of children's novels"- anyone capable of being a real turning point gets shot to death by jihadists), so the religion persists.

I think I generally understood you here but still find much of it impenetrable.

Well, let me try again.

Once upon a time there were suburbs. And the people there didn't see the point of racism, mainly because they had moved away (or could move away) from the thing racism was a proxy for: controlling the urban poor. So they got rid of it.

Their children proceeded to form their entire civic identity around being "the people that banned racism" (they did no such thing, of course- that was all their parents, and these people who think they did it were completely unaware of the calculus behind it. As such, those born in the '50s and '60s are both the most zealous about this and are currently at the apex of their political power).

Those people also banned the construction of new suburbs.

Now their children are in cities (mainly because new suburb construction was banned) and have rediscovered that the protections against the urban poor were necessary.

But they can't get those protections. This is mostly because the people who they need protection from happen to be black, and so desiring that protection is "racist", which violates a religious tenet. (Most of the "X-ist" claims are religious tenets in the same way and for the same reasons.)

And they're too poor to combat this religion. If they were rich enough not to get demoted to urban poor for speaking against that religion [or "blasphemy" for short], they could just leave the city, solving the problem. So the only people invested are inherently going to be ideologues, and if they're at all competent the religion stochastically generates a holy warrior to kill that person.

(Considering those warriors tend to get caught, and the penalty for murder is still death, there's no functional difference between murdering political opponents on religious grounds and your standard run-of-the-mill suicide bombing.)

This is only tangentially related but I'm reminded that the adverse effects of unchecked mass immigration are mostly felt by those natives who have to live among the new arrivals - lower middle-class and working-class people employed in the service and manufacturing sectors. They usually rely on public transport and use public places in their neighborhoods so they have no option to avoid the masses of immigrants. Many of them don't have cars. They cannot afford to move to the suburbs or exurbs either, or to pay for private tuition of their children. And many of these people are also middle-aged or elderly with a small social circle. From the ruling class they receive nothing but mockery and disdain because NPC normies believe that anyone who cannot socially isolate oneself from the smelly underclass in general is a loser. In their frustration they often start supporting anti-immigration parties which in turns invites even more mockery, disdain, hatred and seething.

we had to convince ourselves that we loved living in the suburbs

I think suburb dwellers honestly like living in suburbs. I certainly do.

I tend to agree with the view that suburbs actually combine the disadvantages of urban and rural living while offering the advantages of neither.

As do I! But I have to admit that most of what I hate about cities is more or less optional, in that better policies (and demographics) could fix it.

That's fair. I lived in Shanghai for a bit. Also visited other major Chinese cities on other trips. They have none of the issues I have with American cities. The Chinese have opted out of American-style urban blight.

I still don't want to live in a Shanghai style mega-city. But my complaints would be orthogonal to my issues with American cities.

It’s tough to know because American cities suck. And that’s my point we’ve done a lot of mitigation to unacceptable levels of violence post Great Migration.

A good city you could let your 6 year old walk to first grade a 10 minute walk away because you weren’t worried about a dangerous homeless person giving them trouble. You would have parks nearby. All those amenities are in the suburbs now. And things would be cheaper.

So I understand why you like suburbs better because cities are not good for kids today. And they have lower amenities.

Sorry, but no. You're still not getting it. Most suburbanites are not fleeing urban disorder; they're chasing suburbia. No amount of urban green space can ever replace a private back yard where you can grill and watch the kids and dog run around and plant a personal garden. No amount of smart planning can replace not sharing walls, floors, and ceilings with strangers. No high quality public transit system can ever replace the freedom provided by American car culture.

Suburbs are good in and of themselves, and not just as a mechanism for avoiding poor black people. You could turn every American city into Amsterdam or Tokyo or whatever your dream city is overnight, and none of the benefits of living in a suburb I just described change in any way. Density is not an unalloyed good.

I don't want to sound like a dick but we're living in the age of fancy, flashy, addictive touchscreens so the time your kid is going to willingly spend running around with your dog in your personal garden will be rather limited, and this will probably annoy the hell out of you.

I always compare suburb life to urban life in Buenos Aires because I live there half my time. They have grills and we do an asado all the time.

“No smart planning…strangers”. This is why I’m anti-immigration. What if your neighbors are not strangers? What if your stranger is someone who’s genetically and culturally the same as you? Then they are just a friend maybe a friend you have not met yet.

If you replace stranger with friend in a non multicultural world then you kind of like having them around.

I really wish people were more capable of noticing, let alone publicly agreeing, that the presence of substantial numbers of blacks is just generally a social catastrophe. How many prominent men in American history had great compassion for the negro and despised slavery, but were straightforward in their belief that sending them back to Africa was best for everyone because an integrated society could not possibly work out? Have they not been thoroughly vindicated? And yet the position is so far outside the overton window that afact it's literally unimaginable to most whites. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to propound it here without any amount of pussyfooting. But in this case I think consensus is appropriate.

At some point we need to be prepared to call a spade a spade.

And the social damage whites inflict upon ourselves as we struggle to reconcile our high-minded optimism with reality is likely even worse. I'm in mind of Dan Carlin's point about how 9/11 was as a flea biting a dog, compared to the unbelievable amount of damage the dog then did to itself tearing at the itch.

I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US. We simply cannot be ourselves with them here, and they're not going anywhere. I don't think segregation was long-term viable either but golly it sure did help!

What now? I guess at this point every thought experiment gets derailed by the AI wildcard, and bracketing that out for the sake of conversation seems masturbatory. It's just so unbelievably tragic, how this has all played out.

IDK, if you think I should be more nuanced about this by all means let me know.

I don't think your viewpoint is anathema here, I broadly agree and probably more than a few others too.

To add a bit, I think deportation would probably cause a second civil war of unknown magnitude and destruction, probably enough to ensure the permanent decline of the West and the rise of China. Most people would prefer to avoid sparking a civil war as they would immediately need to pay the costs upfront, with potential benefits reserved for grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Do normal people in the US, or the West in general appear capable of enduring great destruction and social upheaval for a better future? The greatest generation...we are not.

Oh, I was pretty careful to not suggest solutions. I don't think there are any.

The best I've ever come up with, which still isn't good enough, would be to offer large cash incentives and one-way tickets to other countries. Since the average black person costs the taxpayer something like $800k-$1.4m over their lifetime, and has a way of making more of themselves, it seems reasonable to me to offer, say, $500k over ten years to move to a receptive country. I can only imagine that many countries would be happy to set up a receiving program. They get a slice, the emigrant gets set up with citizenship and, in local terms, a small fortune, and the burden to the taxpayer works itself out over a few decades.

The best part of this solution is that it incentivizes exactly the right members of the underclass to take the deal. The ones with the ability to do better than that here, or with the foresight to realize that they'd rather be American in the long term, would stay, and that seems like a good thing to me.

Who could disagree? Totally voluntary, and it could even be dressed up in terms of reparations and helping them flee this evil and racist country.

But, I don't think it'll happen, and like I said before I think AI is about to disrupt the economy and politics so radically that I'm not even sure stuff like this will remain a major consideration.

Actually a workable solution, and I'd support raising taxes to pay for this in the short term. Perhaps the self-deportation incentives were a trial run of this.

Baby steps to let the policy gain social acceptance, then we can talk about involuntarily deporting convicted offenders.

I don't this is a viable solution unless the illegal immigration problem is solved first. If we can't stop people who've never lived in the US from staying permanently there's no way we can stop people who used to live here from coming back when the money runs out.

I meant to include that, yes, fixing immigration first is an obvious prerequisite. It makes no sense to raise taxes to emigrate one person and then let in ten more afterwards, plus spouses and family reunification who will also be a net drain on society in one generation.

I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US.

Even granting, arguendo, everything in your first paragraph, by what mechanism do you see the presence of a large number of blacks in America dooming the entire West, including in Europe, South America, the Commonwealth, etc? It seems to me that the West either committed suicide in 1939–45 or failed in more recent decades (whether due to Communist influence, a superabundance of empathy, etc.).

That's pretty straightforward to me. The main point is that given a Northern victory in the civil war, America was overdetermined to become the cultural and economic pole of the Anglosphere and the West in general, simply due to geography.

America's institutions, however, were designed for Anglos. American schools, communities, politics, etc. simply go to pieces when blacks are admitted en masse as presumed equal members.

I think there were four options:

  1. Send them back
  2. Keep them separate and establish separate legal codes
  3. Treat everyone equally under the law and be prepared for disparities. Like the Irish, I expect that within a few generations they'd have mostly failed to reproduce, and the few (plus hybrids) able to participate in our society would have remained but generally lost their separate identity.
  4. Try so hard to hammer Western society into a shape that generates equal results that it breaks

I think 1 would have been best. 2 was tried, but long-term untenable due to inevitable social forces. 3 would have been my preference given the failure of 1 and 2, but also proved untenable due to social forces.

That leaves 4, and I think 4 is both unrecoverable and must inevitably metastasize given US cultural and economic hegemony.

Obviously the 'social forces' I'm talking about here are key to this, so I'll take a swing at what I mean.

Perhaps it starts with the strain of Puritan idealism that led to so much popular support for fighting the Civil War to 'end slavery' in the first place. Whatever the elites actually thought they were doing there, this was the popular justification for the war, and it didn't go away once the war was won. Blank slatism/egalitarianism became firmly embedded in polite American society. This continued to serve as a guiding principle throughout the decades and, once the US had won WW2, became a perennial casus belli for justifying intervention across the globe. Needless to say this was only massively amplified by setting Hitler up as the polar opposite of American values.

I just don't think it could have gone any other way.

Wokeness originated in America, largely as a response to the black underclass, and then infected Europe and the Anglosphere through the universities and social media. Is it a coincidence that you saw Black Lives Matter protests in the UK?

Can you explain the history behind how a black underclass caused wokeness to develop? There are underclasses all over the world and throughout history yet underclass sympathies usually do not manifest like wokeness. Christian empathy and guilt? Idealism of some sort?

Thanks, that's pithy. I went into a bit more detail in other posts.

I feel like the vagueness of your pronouncements here ("social catastrophe, "we" cannot be "ourselves", lack of imagining a counterfactual to some of the historical gestures you're making) weakens this to the point that it's hard to reply.

Very fair. I'm badly underslept and overheated atm.

social catastrophe

The decline of our cities, communities, culture, educational system, academia, politics, etc. -- all ruined by black presence or poisoned in reaction to the horror experienced when black outcomes are observed. Thus, we cannot be ourselves.

Imagine a US where ~all the blacks had been sent back. Where the great cities of the East and Midwest are still glittering beacons of civilization. Where Academia never caved to blank slatism. Where young couples promenade in the town square in the evenings, unconcerned about violent crime. Where people still felt invested in their communities and the 'bowling alone' effect never kicked in. Where our schools pursue excellence instead of dumbing themselves and everyone else down in pursuit of equal outcomes. Where politics isn't influenced by a racial spoils system.

Can you imagine that? I can't, even. We never got to find out what America might have been.

We cannot be ourselves.

Yes, the US would be a considerably nicer place to live if it were all white. I imagine that the same principle would apply equally to New Zealand, or South Africa, or Nigeria. Was America herself not the birthright of savage peoples in the not-so-distant past?

You realize, the asymptote of your rhetorical line is the wholesale replacement of the non-white peoples of the Earth (plus or minus East Asians) by whites. Perhaps the natives, once reduced to a manageable population, might be allowed a few reservations in the interest of preserving the local fauna. Still, the beacons of civilization which now surround them would not glitter for their sake.

To be clear, I respect your clear-sightedness and I believe your position is the truest and most coherent on the right wing. I am, however, continually frustrated by others' seeming inability to follow the conclusions of their ideas and assumptions past the Overton window, even one as accommodating as here's. I plan on fleshing this argument/rant/sermon out more in tomorrow's thread, but for now I'll ask you this:

Do you wish to wage the race war?

You realize, the asymptote of your rhetorical line is the wholesale replacement of the non-white peoples of the Earth (plus or minus East Asians) by whites.

I'd be dishonoring you by flinching away from this, so I'll say yes, with a caveat. In fact other races do have a tremendous amount to offer, and my ideal ultimate human race is only directionally-white. I'm also not such a fool as to suppose that I know best here. However you slice it, opportunities for gainful admixture are very much on the table. But some things are better than others, and yeah, a good future looks comparatively white.

Perhaps the natives, once reduced to a manageable population, might be allowed a few reservations in the interest of preserving the local fauna.

It's a serious and interesting question and here again I don't suppose myself up to the task of answering it, though I'm pleased that someone has at least floated the topic. This is what we should be arguing about.

Do you wish to wage the race war?

Bear with me, because again I will not show you disrespect by pretending not to understand what you're asking. But I'll digress a bit because the frame just doesn't comport with my own.

The worst case scenario happened before either of us was born and the time for what you're talking about was long, long ago. At this point? Again we have to gesture at AI and remember that, in a sort of dark-mirror land acknowledgement, every conversation we are capable of having must necessarily be in obsolete terms. Again I say that, inasmuch as this is so, it's a fruitless exercise to try to chart any course into the future.

But if I were to float a best-case romantic fantasy scenario, it would be something like a medium-level collapse, balkanization of every mixed country, and the formation of something like the tribes in The Diamond Age, at which point white peoples would (and should) roll up most of the earth.

This should be with an open heart to the best of other peoples, and eagerness to accept them as our own. But you and I both understand this prospect to be marginal. Most cannot compete and so will end up failing to reproduce or in some kind of preserve, yes.

The question of what sub-Saharan Africans have to offer The Good is an interesting one. Should we let them have a place to rape infants and shatter the heads of bald men? Is that worth... anything at all intelligible to us? What does it look like to 'keep them around' but also curb their worst tendencies? Why would we do so?

I don't have clarity on any of this but, like you, I'm mainly upset at the lack of anyone to talk to about it. Oh and, you know, the awareness that clear thinking and good ideas aren't especially pertinent.

Can you imagine that?

Yeah it's called Singapore. If American police were allowed to police the US like Singapore and we had Singapore style laws dealing with violent crime and drug dealing yes it would be fine. Look at Dubai it's super safe despite being full of Indians and Arabs. Policing can create safe and secure societies if you let it.

Might be called Taiwan or Japan too. Subtract out the East Asian influences and culture and you'd get what they have approximately, a high-trust society with relatively low violence and open drug abuse.

Can you imagine that?

Yeah it's called Singapore. If American police were allowed to police the US like Singapore and we had Singapore style laws dealing with violent crime and drug dealing yes it would be fine. Look at Dubai it's super safe despite being full of Indians and Arabs. Policing can create safe and secure societies if you let it.

From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Well, I agree that the design of well-functioning political systems is hard. Singapore might be the best-governed country in the world, and their history is approximately, “Lee Kuan Yew gained very strong individual power over a small country, and unlike the hundreds of times in the history of Earth when that went horribly wrong, Lee Kuan Yew happened to know some economics.”

My read of the historical evidence is that, in this scenario, we probably would have gone Communist in the 20s-30s, and things might well have been considerably worse.

While I don’t think the US would’ve gone communist without blacks, I counterintuitively think it may be more progressive now. The main things the South provided politically was a strong counterbalance to Republicans who wanted to turn the US into Yankeestan in the 19th and early 20th century and and later to progressivism after the New Deal hit. Had the South not resisted the Republicans so much, I could very well see the US being a centralized and conformist nation-state like those of Western Europe. When progressivism really comes around in the 20th century, there would be fewer institutional and cultural blocks to domination by experts. The US Red Tribe would have faced for generations more institutional hostility and less cultural diversity. It’s situation would be closer to its equivalents in Germany or France than what it enjoys today.

Yeah, that's basically my thesis. Greater social cohesion means the effect of cultural trends is significantly magnified, and the Progressive cultural trend was extremely strong even in our world, where social division was strong and deep. I guess our point of disagreement is that I see Communism as an obvious continuation of the Progressive project right back to the Enlightenment itself, so if you strengthen the Progressive push, you strengthen the Communist push as well, and I think beating back Communism was a near-run thing.

I... I'm sorry. What? I cannot even begin to fathom how someone could come to this conclusion.

I'm not being disingenuous, or anything like that. If you have any articles and/or references to point me at, I'd love to read them.

Without the history of slavery, probably there's a lot less conflict in American history. Most likely the Civil War doesn't happen, and the country is much more cohesive rolling into the 1900s. You have no bitter division to pre-seed conflict with modernism as it rolls out; in our actual timeline, a large proportion of elites went hard for socialism/communism around the turn of the century, through the 20s and into the 30s, and the south generated much of the serious resistance to Communism in the 40s, 50s and 60s. How much of that resistance is catalyzed by the acrimony of the civil war, reconstruction and the Jim Crow years?

No articles or references, just a lot of reading about modernism and its leading lights.

What about Australia and Canada? They had no history of slavery, were they leaning communist in the same timeframe? I genuinely don't know, just asking for some points of reference in anglo societies.

My understanding is that the US provided a very large amount of the anti-communist energy throughout the Cold War. Canada I think is too close to the US to disambiguate. Australia I don't know much about. My understanding is that England was profoundly compromised by Communists top-to-bottom, and that's in the real world where the US is working as hard as possible to drag them back.

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This somehow tracks on an historical level and yet it seems off.

I know that a homogeneous society can more easily sustain more social spending and higher taxation for public goods but I think that doesn’t necessarily translate into fondness for communism or more importantly, the ability of a communist party to successfully launch a coup.

And America has a lot of built up anti-communist antibodies in the form of our religion, our civic institutions, the shape and scope of our landmass, etc.

Jacobin-like Argentina is the closer analogue. Argentina was wealthier than France at the beginning of the 20th century and absolutely imploded in slow motion until it was an utter backwater and stayed that way and might continue to stay that way unless the supreme autist Milei actually gets a durable victory.

Argentine is almost entirely European and yet managed to fuck up an enormous economic lead and turned into a socialist shithole.

I'd be interested in an analysis to that effect, whether your own or someone else's. I know there was a major such movement at that time, and I don't think blacks had much to do with the Great Depression. I'd like to think some degree of American spirit would have warded off communism, but really don't know enough to guess.

To be clear it's not my contention that without blacks everything would have gone great. I'm not a believer in earthly Utopia. But this timeline is a specific kind of ugly and I wish I could even imagine what an alternative might look like.

There is a bizarre meme going around the segment of the right that still listens to libertarians that in fact, the left are entirely correct about the chuds' motivations for voting, and the sole reason why the American right-wing voter supports capitalism is because they're too racist to spend money on black people. I assume libertarians took on the talking point because it's so detached from actual people that only a highly educated person could possibly believe it ("nonsense is a uniform", as they say), and therefore signals some kind of status in their world - plus that there are few higher aspirations for a libertarian than to find a galaxy-brained way to agree with the left. But it's obviously not true, and is based on a facile reading of studies about the relationship between diversity and the breakdown of social solidary that doesn't survive a moment's contact with empirical reality. No, white Americans did not choose economic liberty as a principle of government because doing so denied gibs to black people. Nobody seriously believes any of this, it's just a Hot Take.

Quite right and there's also the example of homogenous Britain and metropolitan France in this period. They didn't go communist despite a far rougher time in WW1 than the US, despite more pressure being placed upon them. In Germany the communists were cut down.

US whites were largely British/German descended.

EDIT: Not sporting to respond to a banned user.

I don't dispute the contributions of Black Americans or their claimed birthright. But I dislike living near the urban blacks who commit disproportionally high rates of murder and physical violence compared to every other ethnic/racial group on earth. If the US is the birthright of blacks, they should stop treating their birthright as a diaper for everyone else to clean up for them.

And to be clear, it's not all blacks that are like this obviously, and all the blacks posting on here would probably be good neighbors. Just a statistically significant minority of blacks are ruining it for everyone, so much so that deporting all blacks becomes a latent desire.

Then stop murdering and pestering us. Let our cities be safe and livable. Why is every bad neighborhood near me black - and the other bad ones all Hispanic? Don’t say money - I was born in communist Poland …. None of this kind of shit was there post communism.

Yea it’s your country too - it’s the fault of America that it integrated and now it god damn needs to be solved. Solve it.

...and there's the rub. I think you're right. Black Americans are just as much a part of the USA, of the American nation, as white Americans. Free black people, not just slaves, were active in American public life well before the USA was even founded. The idea of mass deportations of black Americans is to me as absurd as deporting all American Indians 'back to Siberia'.

I also think the other guy's right (about the analysis, he doesn't really present a solution). ADOS are prone to commit crimes and socially deleterious activity at higher rates than other American peoples (not just whites), and no social intervention really seems to change this. I don't think white Americans have or had a right to deport all black Americans 'back to Africa' but we really seem to have stumbled into the worst compromise possible of ever-growing totalitarian falsifications of data and witch-hunts for invisible systemic racists.

I think the least worst solution, if Anglo institutions are indeed only suited for an 'Anglo' people, would have been autonomy within the framework of the Union. Turning the black belt into a black-majority state, for example, but not requiring affirmative action or ever-expanding reverse racism in every sector of white-majority areas. But that also seems so far outside the overton window to be unimaginable. Especially since the unfalsifiable conspiracy theory of 'systemic racism' would say that invisible Texas oilmen were sabotaging the black majority state if it was behind white-majority states in any respect.

A two-state solution? Heh.

I'm all for it, by the way. But implementation seems impossible.

We already do this for American Indian tribes. No reason we couldn't grant reservations to ADOS.

We tried that. It's called Liberia, and it went about as well as you'd expect.

Not really. I often see this (perhaps unintentional) oversimplification from HBD enjoyers where the strong hypothesis it affects outcomes is overdetermined and actual historical and environmental factors get minimized. Liberia was a colony of voluntary self-deports, as sleepyegg says, comprised both American freedmen and Caribbean freedmen (big cultural differences there already), and had to deal with a native population even less amenable to western statehood. Plus it was cut loose by the much more isolationist American second republic c. 1850 and was on its own eking out an existence on the Dark Continent, only getting the typical New Dealer foreign policy gibs beginning almost a century later.

Nevertheless, it was one of the more functional African countries because the Americo-Liberians set up a based Yarvinist sham democracy that never let the natives near anything important and even had the impishness to call the one ruling party the Whigs... until they fell for the democracy meme in the 80s and were consumed by brutal intra-black civil wars.

In any case, I think a black state or associated commonwealth would definitely have worse outcomes than, say, Oregon, but it would benefit from inclusion in the American economy, American military protection/military-industrial complex subsidies and so on and so forth. Still wouldn't work without killing the invisible Texas oilmen wreckers mind-virus.

Liberia is closer to voluntary self-deportation. I meant a two state solution in carving off multiple black belt US states and giving them autonomy except in foreign policy. Something like Catalonia within Spain.

I think the window for doing this sailed a long time ago though. It sailed, hit an iceberg, and lays forlorn at the bottom of the ocean.

Given that you didn't address the object-level point at all, either you don't understand what's being proposed here or you're not interested in discussing it, so... Do give your veteran relatives my thanks, but I'm not sure I have much else to say.

Do give your veteran relatives my thanks

A “you’re welcome” would be a better fit.

Black Americans need/needed the hard-carrying of white Americans (and later, Asian Americans too) to achieve a substantially higher standard of living than they could (have) ever hope(d) to achieve on their own. Much more so than white Americans need/needed black Americans to win any wars (if at all), especially since any black American contribution is on the meat bag/foot soldier front and not the technological.

Everything was fine about your post except the "Fuck you!" You get a 2-day ban for that.

Thats a nice idea but the timeline here is basically backwards.

Sweden started liberalising its economy well before the period of mass immigration you’re talking about. A lot of it came out of the broader liberalising trend of the late 80s and 90s, and the Swedish 90s financial crisis accelerated it significantly. This was the period when Sweden deregulated, reformed taxes, cut spending, balanced the state budget, reformed pensions and introduced things like the school voucher system.

At roughly the same time, migration policy was actually being tightened, despite migration still being comparatively low.

The next major wave of economic liberalisation came under Reinfeldt’s centre-right government, which won in 2006. That government pushed further labour market and tax reforms, and then also liberalised immigration, including the major labour migration reform in 2008 and further liberalisation later on.

That, combined with wars and chaos in the Middle East, helped drive immigration much higher in the following years. So again, the economic liberalisation being pointed to here had already happened before the large migration wave.

And after immigration peaked, the political direction changed again. The centre-left returned to power in 2014, the pace of economic liberalisation slowed considerably, and after 2015 migration policy itself became much more restrictive.

So I don’t really see how the Swedish case supports this argument. The sequence is wrong. Economic liberalisation largely came first, with its ideological baggage arguably even enabling the large wave of immigration that came later.

If anything, the actual chronology points causality the other way.

Interesting, thanks for replying.

America’s social spending is not an outlier compared to European countries:

European countries are a very diverse basket but countries like France and Belgium have figures of ~30% of GDP on public social spending, 50% more than the US. The OECD fakes the difference with a ‘private social spending’ metric but this is very questionable.

The US’ far higher absolute wealth, far higher growth rate and much higher disposable incomes (compared to fixed costs for many imports that, for example, both the US and Western European countries and consumers rely on) also distort spending; the French don’t cut because they’re structurally incapable of it without the end of the fifth republic; Californian cities can spend $100k a year per homeless person because they’re so rich that they don’t really even have to care.

American conservatives have an allergy to having the state give money to the poor which they know is going to disproportionately go to blacks. But it certainly didn't stop America's penchant for shoveling money to the Olds through SS + Medicare. It might have even supercharged that to some degree as a replacement for typical socialism. America isn't that much less socialist than the rest of Europe.

Blacks die earlier too. So funneling money to old people would disproportionately favor whites over blacks. If this was not true and SS benefited blacks more then potentially we would have killed SS in the ‘90s and gone to a 401k for all system.

Though Europe does a lot of old people stuff too so I don’t think that’s the driving force.

As a percentage of taxes paid, who gets more from social security, white people or black people?

Social security is screwing over one group in particular, but its not blacks. The group that loses out the most is men in blue collar jobs earning wages near the cap. Low earning women are the greatest beneficiaries.

I think some of this has arisen from the K-shaped economy. Any cities that survived the general contraction of manufacturing and industry are now bimodally organized: either a neighborhood is well-to-do with white-collar/tech/service jobs and the resources to match, or they're blighted, decaying, and continually downtrodden.*

*I don't think gentrification and the proliferation of "artsy" neighborhoods represent a meaningful alternative. They're too few and far between and often fail to generate much economic growth.

I love how blighted cities or a lack of economy are spoken of as if forces of nature, as if outsourcing angered Hephaestus, and he smote these cities with his hammer. Dooming them to a bunch of zombies shambling around on fent being terminally incapable of founding a business or higher executive function. A total lack of agency.

I won't go so far as to say that all poor people are low-agency, but certainly low-agency people tend to be poor and exist in higher concentrations in poor areas. The blighted aren't damned forever, but any efforts at rehabilitation have to be coordinated and significant enough to overcome the social inertia of years of pessimism, apathy, and lack of opportunity. It's much easier to just let them tumble down and funnel new development into "good" areas.

You are doing the thing even in your reply, I'm vaguely gesturing at the people themselves, they should be able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, not wait for jobbie trees to sprout, showering them with work and financial opportunity. The fact they actually need an outside intervention is an indiction upon the whole demographic.

You know that "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" is about something a person can't do, right?

Eh I guess, but these days with a govt issued phone and EBT in hand (thus solving 2 of your major existence hurdles) not making it is on you.

My armchair urbanist take is that exclusionary zoning (rather than density) is much more of a detriment to walking and other use cases, though I'm not sure how much this links directly with white flight and de facto segregation. I do think there is a significant potential connection, in that by making it so there's no legitimate reason for an outsider to be in your neighborhood, it makes it easy to call the cops on anyone who isn't a neighbor walking his dog or baby or something. If there's a shop in the neighborhood it brings in lots of people just coming through or loitering.

Honestly at this point I'm not even racist anymore when it comes to urbanism, I just want all the walking garbage on the streets to be rounded up and disposed of.

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