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Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Your link doesn’t appear to say anything about interbreeding, only that certain European populations performed and still perform better than others. Would you say that all those groups have failed to assimilate to American culture?

Because they act differently from one another due to genetic reasons insofar as they have failed to interbreed appropriately.

I almost suspect that the author isn’t actually American;

IIRC he's Southern and the subtext is the wops and greaseballs (I'm being comedic here) never assimilated to that, which they didn't. And neither did the Scandinavians, have you seen Minnesota? And the Germans had to be forced to stop speaking it and then they interbreeded a lot with the English so that produced a mixture, which I think more or less destroyed or permanently crippled American liberty but I don't know for sure (Germans are admirable in many ways but they have never understood liberty).

It also suggests that such groups can’t have assimilated because they don’t vote “like the rest of White America does.”

That Anglo-German breeding group leans Republican while all the others, including other European strains that have been in the country for over a century, lean Democratic.

I don’t see how this contradicts anything about “evolution.” People are more than their genes.

But how much more? Genes predominate.

So yes, I think that cultural assimilation absolutely happens before genetic assimilation.

Interestingly even if that is true to a small extent, it is the spaghetti effect. Italians are assimilated because spaghetti is American food. I wonder how that happened ... tacos and burritos might as well be now too. Ah, but that's the least heritable and most shallow form of culture. The deep and heritable components require interbreeding.

How do you define assimilation? I think that word does a lot of work in your argument. I think I replied to you before that it was almost offensive how you seemed to water down culture into hats and sports. Then you also kind of imply if immigrants force natives towards their center of gravity that also counts -- you can't call Americans unassimilated for voting for the Democratic party, which heavily relies on non-legacy American votes, for example. Because everybody knows that party, and spaghetti, and fajitas are as American as Thomas Jefferson.