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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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When California sends it's people, they're not sending their best.

You're experiencing blue tribe whites from LA. Native Angelenos are actually 2/3 non-white and 40% immigrant, and have the same complaints you do. They enthusiastically barge into Mexican and Korean neighborhoods with the same smug, passive-aggressive, arrogance they do in your neighborhood. The appropriate Vietnamese culture without any desire to be part of the Vietnamese community.

New Orleans has a greater cultural depth than any other city in this country, as it has been an outpost of one empire after another, wealthy enough to bring adventurers, but humid and distant enough that it doesn't become overwhelmed. Los Angeles isn't the cultureless wasteland you think it is though, due to another quirk: Prop 13. The East Coasters (black and white) that moved to LA for the post-war aerospace boom? They're still there, living in their 50s houses. They're paying $100/year in property tax because of Prop 13, and they'll stay there forever. The Persians, Armenians, and Koreans have been in LA for three generations now, as have the Vietnamese. They're still in their little houses that they can't extend because that would trigger a ruinous property tax increase.

That's real LA - a city built to 1950s row-house density, accidentally multi-generational and thus continuous due to Prop 13 keeping grandparents around, with thriving ethnic neighborhoods. The people that built the hot rods or fled the Shah (and possibly both!) are still there!

The same smug cultural vampires that have floated over to your culture have been sticking their fangs into LA for decades now. I assure you real LA hates them as much as you do.

Native Angelenos are

40% immigrant

Do you even read what you’re typing before posting it?

Everything important and valuable in Los Angeles was built by Americans from other parts of the country. The Tongva Indians who lived there before the Spanish arrived were hunter-gatherers and built no advanced settlements. Once the Spaniards showed up, they established a small mission, which had a few hundred people living in it at its peak. Later under Mexican sovereignty it grew to a small city of less than 2,000 people, which was still the population when Americans conquered it during the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. Even in 1870 its population was only about 5,000. By the year 1900 it was over 100,000 people - the overwhelming majority of them Americans from different parts of the country. It was those people that built Los Angeles as you know it: Anglos from the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast. You are merely a squatter on their patrimony. The “native” brown Angelenos you want to pretend are the “real” founding stock of the country were an afterthought to the people who actually built everything around you.

The “native” brown Angelenos you want to pretend are the “real” founding stock of the country were an afterthought to the people who actually built everything around you.

I know you've got some ideological commitments that cause you to overreact to this topic.

I don't think the brown Angelenos are the founding stock of LA. Without doxxing myself, I'm actually pretty close to white LA. I love that culture, and I alluded to them. They built JPL and the hot rods, they gave us surf culture and fighter jets, they gave American culture everything from astronaut buzzcuts to Hollywood.

They voted for Ronald Reagan and Howard Jarvis. If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name Southern California in the 80s.

They're also gone. LA county is about 1/4 non-Hispanic white, and that population is overwhelmingly older, almost retired. LAUSD is 10% non-Hispanic white, and they're not the type to vote for Ronald Reagan, to put it mildly.

All the sane white people left LA, and the only people with roots are the ones that stuck around in their ethnic enclaves. Today's LA is immigrant enclaves and white liberals.

You love to talk about patrimony, and America and Southern California does have a culture worth passing down. Based on rates of everything from military service to patriotism to car ownership, the people of the ethnic enclaves are a lot closer to my Red Tribe culture than the white liberals.

All you are saying is that there is no longer a native population of LA. Its all thieves. To make your point a bit more concisely.

Again, the question is “why?” What caused that change?

White (and black) normies could and did flee when California went crazy. Many immigrants in enclaves could not, since they didn't speak the language. Their relatives needed to be near those non-English speakers, and that created a core community that was hard to leave.

The result is all the English-speaking normies left, leaving immigrant enclaves and crazy white liberals.

Do you even read what you’re typing before posting it?

This was unnecessary.

As for your post, I find it funny how everyone from wignat Americans to defenders of Jewish ethnostates to Palestinian sympathizers wants to start history at whatever point is convenient for their argument. Sure, the people who first built the city of Los Angeles were white, but if a fourth-generation Mexican-American isn't a "native Angeleno," then you might as well acknowledge that the Tongva Indians have an equally valid claim to the "patrimony" of their land. Oh, are you actually arguing that the people who built things you value are the ones who get to claim the land? Well, guess you're ready to cede much of California to China, then. (Back in the 80s, it was Japan.)

Right, yes, human history is one long story of one group taking things - usually by force - from another group of people. I am very happy to be a direct descendant of a group which was extremely successful at taking things from other groups, and then using the newly-acquired land and resources to build something vastly better and of more importance to the future than anything the dispossessed group would or could have built using the same land and resources. If, some day, some even more advanced group conquers the territory currently occupied by my group, this will be very bad for my descendants, and it is a fate which obviously I am keen to try and prevent. If it happens, though, at least I can hope that they use their conquered territory and resources to build something glorious and important, as opposed to simply squandering and uglifying it.

The “native” brown Angelenos you want to pretend are the “real” founding stock of the country were an afterthought to the people who actually built everything around you.

Who do you think built El Pueblo de la Reyna de Los Angeles?

Going by Spanish law at the time, white people.

The people who were later replaced by a new group of people who vastly expanded the original settlement into something incalculably larger, more valuable, and more important. AKA nearly every existing structure in the city today, and the infrastructure needed to support those things.

Can you please explain what exactly "patrimony" is and why anyone should care who's "patrimony" something may or may not be part of? As far as I see it used here, it just seems to be a pretty word constantly constantly used to defend extremely anti-egalitarian and anti-meritocratic policies.

A patrimony is any thing of value which is passed down from person or family to the direct descendants of that person or family. Used more broadly, it can mean a thing of value that is passed down within members of a particular society or group of people to those whom they’ve designated as the inheritors of that thing.

If your complaint is that the fact that families can own things of value and that a father can choose to exclusively transfer ownership of that thing to his children, rather than to the stranger whom you deem most “deserving” of it, then I simply say that you and I have wildly different moral foundations. It’s okay for parents to favor their own children, rather than the children who are “objectively the most meritorious”. When my grandfather died, he transferred ownership of his home to his daughter - not to the person whom he thought would “do the best job” of cultivating its value or improving it aesthetically or whatever you think his criteria should have been.

I am simply extending the principle of family inheritance to societies and ethnic groups as a whole. People for most of history did their part to improve their local polity not simply for the benefit of their own individual children and grandchildren, but also the other future inhabitants of that same polity. If that polity were then, say, conquered or abandoned, and then some new group of people were to inhabit the same place and appropriate the existing things of value for themselves, such a state of affairs would obviously be contrary to the wishes of the previous inhabitants. (The new inhabitants would not be morally wrong in having taken something from someone else - the history of humanity is one long story of groups taking things by force from other groups - but it is clearly desirable and of vital importance for one group of people to endeavor to not suffer the fate of having its valuable things taken by another group of people.)

I am simply extending the principle of family inheritance to societies and ethnic groups as a whole.

This is much bigger complaint than your second paragraph. Why is ethnicity the right way to group people and why don't you like extending the principle to groups that share the same values and culture instead? I normally see "patrimony" used here to poetically sneak in this connotation of hereditary descent when it's never justified.

why don't you like extending the principle to groups that share the same values and culture instead?

To some extent, I do! As I laid out in this thread back on Reddit, I see whiteness as a category which is at least partially constructed, despite having a mostly-biological substrate. East Asians, for example, are not even remotely related to Europeans (unless one accepts deeply esoteric theories about the contribution of Tocharian/Indo-European-descended people to the genetic ancestry of the Yamato people from whom modern Japanese are mostly descended - a topic about which I’m totally unqualified to even offer speculation) yet since the end of World War II certain Asian countries have been some of the most productive and important contributors to first-world industrialized society of any peoples on earth. Personally, I’m happy to welcome Japanese and Koreans into the fold of people with whom I see myself as sharing a common destiny and at least some level of common patrimony, as long as they continue to seem willing to behave similarly toward me and mine.

However, the vast majority of people in the world do seem to achieve the highest degree of fulfillment and self-satisfaction when living among people with whom they share a common ancestry and deep history. Now, perhaps that’s simply an incidental consequence of the fact that in such parts of the world, genetic kinship tends to have a nearly one-to-one correspondence with cultural/linguistic/political similarity.

Maybe in a hypothetical world in which “values” were randomly distributed among people, such that it would be impossible to draw any sort of reliable inference about a person’s “values” or personality based on observing that person’s outwardly-apparent racial/ethnic background, it really would make no sense to place any value whatsoever on racial/ethnic similarity when deciding whom to associate with and share political sovereignty and resources with.

All available evidence, though, would seem to indicate that we do not, in fact, live in that hypothetical world. In the world in which we do live, cultures and “values” did not fall from the sky and pick ethnic groups at random. Things like personality are, in fact, heritable to a great degree. Consequently, people who are closely related genetically/ancestrally do in fact have a greater likelihood of having similar “values” than do people who are not related genetically/ancestrally. To the extent that this is true, it actually does make complete sense to see people with whom I share genuine documentable kinship to have a greater claim to my “patrimony” than do those with whom I share no kinship.

The average black American has vastly more in common with a random white American than they do a random white African.

As a White South African who lives in America this isn’t true at all lol

Besides stuff like what television shows you grew up watching or sports you enjoy who h are very superficial things in the grand scheme of things, the cultural norms are similar enough between all Western European settler cultures.

More comments

I don’t think he’s talking about simply handing the land over, but instead the right of conquest, which is and always has been how things work without a powerful overseeing government to enforce other rules and rights. Absent a power willing to enforce your right to a patrimony, the only other option is to be strong enough to enforce your claims. I don’t think that’s a moral claim in either direction, it’s simply a statement of fact that there’s not really a way to prevent a stronger group from taking your land, your stuff or anything else they want without someone strong enough to stop them.

I also did a double take. California is the land of the great white hope, which makes the browning of the imminent horde that much worse.

It was 90+% white as late as the 70s.

This says that California was only 76% non-Hispanic white in 1970. It is wrong?

Duplicating a comment (how do you tag users?):

In the US "White" includes most Hispanics (besides Arabs). Every branch of my family's been in California since the 1920s, when they came from New Mexico. They spoke English and Spanish for 4 generations before the move, and more since. If you look at the employee roaster for Hughes Aircraft Company's engineers in 1959, half the names are Alvarez, Vasquez etc. The same for a high school marching band in 1942...

While the 80s and 90s saw a massive influx of Mexicans, the "Whites" in the bullet belt aren't who you're thinking of. I have a few generations of family in aerospace and their work photos aren't super white. By the late 70s, you get the children and wives of executed Vietnamese judges, many doctors, electrical engineers etc. coming. Within a few years, they appear on department pictures and cards.

how do you tag users?

@veqq (u/veqq points at Reddit)

It is a question for open border advocates. One argument against immigration is that it imports voters who will vote in a way that leads to bad government.

Isn’t California a real world example of that change?

I used the website below, which gets data from the census bureau, to see how much of California was white in 1975. 87.6%--because the 1975 data does not include Hispanic as a category.

https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/california/?endDate=2021-01-01&startDate=1975-01-01

One of the major problems of the whole categorization system (as documented by David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy) is that Hispanic is basically a non-category. Hispanic just means, "sort of associated with Spanish" in practice, and most "Hispanic" Californians and Texans were European genetically for the vast majority of US history.

Am I going mad? Because it looks like the 2021 data doesn't distinguish hispanic from white either, so in 2021 the state was 71.1% white.

That seems strange, I'd expect the census bureau to want more information than "black, white or other?" But on the other hand, if hispanics are white enough for the census bureau, why do they need to be distinguished?

Try narrowing the years to something like 2010—2023 and Hispanic will populate. I don't know what year the census bureau started asking people if they were Hispanic (I'm pretty sure the US Census is actually where the word "Hispanic" was invented) but the charts on that website will stop showing that data as soon as you include any years where the question wasn't asked.

I hope that makes you feel less crazy—although many people go mad for reasons that have nothing to do with the Census Bureau. I'm not qualified to rule those out for you.

The Census Bureau considered Hispanic to be an ethnicity, not a race. Hence, one can be white and Hispanic (Ted Cruz) as well as black and Hispanic (eg many Cuban-American baseball players).

Hence, the Census Bureau reports that California is currently almost 71% "white alone" but only 34% "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino."

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