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From the UK: White pupils excluded from extra Saturday literacy lessons
There was some discussion at the end of the last CW thread about the purpose of race-based immigration policies. Why not just test directly for IQ? Why use race, which can only be a proxy for other desirable traits like IQ or low criminality? The simple answer is: to avoid situations like this!
In general, I think it's a mistake for ethnonationalists to focus so strongly on purportedly intrinsic psychological properties of certain groups, like IQ or criminality. It does leave you open to the question of why you're an ethno nationalist, instead of an IQ nationalist or a low-crime nationalist (a focus on crime rates in particular leads to consequences that are unpalatable for the far right: if your overriding goal is to reduce crime rates, then you should be trying to build a society that has as few males as possible!).
An argument for ethnonationalism that sidesteps these concerns is that racial discrimination and preferential race-based treatment are more difficult to implement in a racially homogeneous society. If everyone in your city is white, then it won't even make sense for the local school district to set up a special program for black children. Instead, they'll just direct their resources towards the one and only racial group that is actually present.
It will be objected that there can be intra-European ethnic conflicts as well. Why stop at European nationalism? Why not separate out, say, the Anglos and the Germans too, to make sure they don't start engaging in preferential ethnic treatment as well. To which I say: if that's what you want, then fine! If two European ethnic groups did get into an ethnic conflict, then I would recommend (as a possible option, assuming that reconciliation does not seem feasible) that they should split up and live apart from each other as well. But there is currently no such ethnic conflict. There are however active tensions between whites and other groups, so that's the level of analysis that people tend to work at. Ethnonationalism is not an a priori eternal first principle of political organization; it is a pragmatic proposal designed to ameliorate ongoing conflicts, the same way that a couple can propose a divorce if they aren't getting along.
Granted, I don't think a Saturday school program only for black children is a catastrophic loss for white children. I think the school system itself plays a rather small role in a child's "education" anyway, in comparison to genetics and the child's home environment. But it is symptomatic of how it is currently popular to show preferential treatment to non-whites in Western countries today. More sweeping examples would be university affirmative action (recently made illegal in the US, but, I don't think university admissions officers are simply going to give up consideration of race that easily) and corporate DEI initiatives. It simply wouldn't be as appealing for Disney to woke-ify their classic franchises if they were based in a country that was 95% white to begin with.
IQ is like strength. It measures performance.
Race is more like nationality, it's about measuring what team you're on.
Say aliens with 1000 IQ showed up tomorrow and harmed our interests by scooping up all the world's forests for their zoo or whatever. It makes no sense to support them just because they're high IQ. For that matter, it makes no sense for Englishmen to support fellow Englishmen who sell them out to foreign interests or exploit public resources for personal gain.
Intelligence is not an unalloyed good in all contexts - just consider our longstanding concerns about AI! The most important thing is what team one is on, capabilities are secondary. If someone is high IQ but uses that intellect to market addictive drugs or perpetrate financial scams, they're worse than their anti-social low IQ peers who tend to be less destructive.
Race, religion, culture, nationality, language are the surest ways of defining what team people are on, in that order. These factors last longer than political ideologies. See the conflicts between communist Russia and China, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Now some will say that different races can work in harmony under a single state. I agree. They can work in harmony, for a time. Yet there's nearly always someone on top, nearly always tension and an eventual break-up. Multiculturalism as we know it today has only really been tried since the 1960s. The Austrian empire ruled over diverse nationalities for centuries (and not nearly as diverse as we're talking about today), yet it still collapsed back into its constituent parts.
We grossly underestimate the importance of unity. What happens when there's a major, serious crisis on the scale of the world wars? Someone will lose, some countries will be put under incredible strain by defeat and recrimination. Multi-national states disintegrate, national states survive. Just imagine if your country suffered 1/10th as much as North Korea. Fifty years of harsh Japanese occupation, then a devastating failed war where every single urban centre was incinerated by the USAF such that people were living in holes in the ground. Then forty years of Stalinist dictatorship, a famine as your superpower ally disintegrated along with your trade, near total isolation from world markets (remember that North Korea is mountainous, cold and lacks much fertile land or oil), blatant hostility from another superpower (Axis of Evil speech)... and despite all that they still have thermonuclear weapons, ballistic missiles plus a huge army! If North Korea had been multi-ethnic, it would've fallen apart like Iraq and Syria. IQ is also a factor, Koreans are pretty smart.
Anyway, diversity isn't strength, unity is strength. Trading unity for brainpower makes the state fragile and more prone to internal conflicts. Everyone should be on the same team, especially when chips are down. This very story proves that the UK is not united, there are open divisions even in peacetime. Consider the RAF stories of whites being rejected, general diversity aspirations throughout the workforce. This is a bad sign!
Only if people choose to define themselves in those terms. For example, although there might be some American whites who choose to define themselves as being on the same "team" as whites in Great Britain and Australia, most of them would define themselves as being on the American "team." Every individual has dozens of identities, and it is not a given which one will be most salient.
This is remarkably ahistorical. The idea that "nationalities" exist is a comparatively recent one, as is the concomitant belief nationalism, i.e, the belief that each nationality has a right to it own state. Therefore, the argument it is impossible for one state to encompass more than one "nationality" is essentially circular; if people living in one state define themselves as belonging to different nationalities, then of course the state is going to have legitimacy problems. But, if they don't, then it won't.
Most importantly, the assumption that the fact that I identify with race X means that I see race X as my "team" (i.e. my nation, i.e, the identify to which I owe the greatest degree of loyalty) is wrong.
Sure, there is such a thing as American culture. It is possible to decenter the importance of some identities - religion is very important in Lebanon but less so in the US. But do you not see the huge importance of race in America or the UK? There's a huge diversity apparatus trying to allocate people of the right race in the right place. I've filled in job applications in the current year, I know this to be true. Simply being a citizen of a state doesn't cut it any more.
Really? There had never been nationalist uprisings against foreign rule before the 19th century? Nationalism got more popular and powerful then but nationalism has been a factor for all of human history. What about the Judeans rising up against Rome, was there not even a little nationalism there?
States can encompass multiple nations but it introduces fragilities that often prove harmful. You can lump Occitan and Brittany together, put Wessex and Northumberland and Scotland together with sound management. But East Anglia and Mogadishu or Papua New Guinea is a much bigger ask.
Putting you specifically to one side, if everyone in America is on the same team, why all the rioting and strife, why the existence of this website which primarily exists to discuss political conflict in the USA, why the massive and persistent variation in voting by race?
I didn't say otherwise. OP made a claim that race is inherently the surest way of determining what "team" someone is on, and I was taking issue only with that specific claim.
No. Not nationalist uprisings based on the principle of nationalism. There have been uprisings based on maltreatment, or no taxation without representation, or neglect of local interests, real or imagined ("What have the Romans ever done for us?"), but not on the claim, "all 'nations' have the right to their own state; we are a 'nation'; therefore, we have the right to our own state." Because that was OP's claim: That governing a multi-group state is inherently impossible, because look at the Austrian empire! Even it eventually dissolved! I was merely pointing out that that happened only because of the advent of nationalism, and only because the constituent groups of the empire came to see themselves as "nations."
Maybe, but that is a much weaker claim than the original claim of impossibility.
I cannot tell exactly how you are using the term "nation." If you mean it in the nationalism sense, your claim is true by definition, but not every group sees itself as a nation. Most do not.
Because the inhabitants thereof are of different races? Or because they have different interests?
I didn't say that everyone on America is on the same team always. After all, all states, even monoracial ones, have political conflict among subgroups. And, as an aside. you are greatly overstating the scale of the variation in voting by race.
No, I said:
Furthermore, nations have always saw themselves as nations. It's not a complex idea. If you have a distinct culture, ethnicity, language, you want autonomy, you want to advance your own interests first and foremost as opposed to be part of foreign empires. Why did nations fight wars against foreign occupation, even before the 19th century? Why did a bunch of Greek states ally together to resist Persia (others collaborated yet the odds were wildly stacked against the Athenian-Spartan led alliance)? They wanted to preserve their independence, their freedom, their rights. The Persians ruled over many nations at the time and were fairly tolerant, yet the Greeks saw a fundamental, worth-dying-for need for independence.
By this logic you could obliterate nationalism entirely. Malaysia might complain about British exploitation of their resources, the Slovakians might complain about economic inequality and Czechs running things, the Norwegians might complain about Swedish protectionism hurting their interests. My point is that you can't separate maltreatment, unfair taxation, neglect of local interests from nationalism. How can the Norwegians know that it's unfair that Sweden gains from protectionism while Norway loses, how are they able to distinguish between them.
Two heads of the same coin. People from PNG have a completely different culture and way of life to East Anglians, why would there be any cohesion there? Witchhunts in the UK and witchhunts in PNG carry very different connotations.
In 2012, 97% of blacks who voted, voted for Obama. The significant differences between presidents Obama, Biden and Trump hardly seems to change these ratios.
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And my point is that you can. As I said, there is a very important difference between the claim, "we should be independent because we will be better off/taxed less/get better treatment if we are independent" and the claim, "we should be independent, regardless of whether we would be treated better, because we are a "nation" and every nation has a right to be independent."
You are choosing an outlier among an outlier and using it to represent the norm. The historical norm for black support of the Democratic candidate over the last 40 years is about 88-99 pct. Other groups range from the 40s to the 60s.
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