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Notes -
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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