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You and your coworker are suffering from a condition that zoomers would prescribe "touching grass" as a solution to.
Honest advice. Get a grip.
Life is still unkind to most people in the World. Poverty, Death and Disease are a reality for everyone in the world. While you are lamenting about how your descendants will look 300 years from now, your Third World analogue is lamenting the early death of his wife to Tuberculosis.
Living in a racially heterogeneous society is like the 50th thing you should worry about if you want your descendants to live a good life. So you either are ignorant about how bad those 49 other things are or you think this thing is possibly so bad that it is that much more dreadful, neither of which paints you in a rational light.
For all you know your great^n descendants could be murderers and rapists. They could like in a nuclear wasteland. They could be homeless etc. They could be CHINESE. Just take the problem of raising your own children to be the kind of people who will take raising their own children seriously as well, and you will kind find yourself not worrying about what they will look like 200 years later.
The hypothetical politics [+demographics] of the future should not be keeping you up at night, the matters of self improvement and your own immediate family (NOW IN THE PRESENT) and their well being should. Keep your spouse happy, keep your parents happy, keep your kids happy, be useful to your friends, your community and yourself. Embody good culture within yourself and live it, instead of lamenting its dilution through the gene pool. Walk the walk.
So what? Send a black kid from a nice family to an all white school in a trailer park in West Virginia, middle of nowhere Quebec, a shitty part of Ohio. They're going to have a bad time.
You're right: Poverty is bad. A relative lack of morality or culture or whatever you want to call it is bad. Crime is bad. Drugs are bad. African Americans don't have a monopoly on any of these things, but we have double standards for crack-dealing superpredators/innocent white victims of opioid overdoses. Unemployed whites in the midwest are innocent victims of globalization who had their jobs ripped away from them, while blacks living in deprecated inner-city slums are shiftless, lazy and sucking at the welfare teat.
Do we? Does the rap sheet of the mean or median "crack dealing superpredator" actually resemble that of the average "opioid overdose?" If it doesn't, if the behavior of these two groups is actually significantly different, why should we assess them identically? I'm pretty sure most or all the murder-capitol-area contenders are majority-black. Most of the current massive spike in the murder rate is black-on-black.
Suppose you had solid evidence that the former communities were once flourishing, and then decayed into hellholes, while the later communities were hell-holes from the start. Would this not, again, be valid grounds to assess them differently? The Projects were a project, an intentional expenditure of vast resources and effort in an attempt to ameliorate the evident social problems of the Black community. Did Appalachia get Projects? Did the Midwest? These questions aren't purely rhetorical, but the evidence I'm aware of leans pretty heavily in one direction.
I wouldn't ask you to assess them identically. But one is viewed as a threat to society, whereas the other is a victim. The crack-dealing superpredator was born wicked, while the opiate-addicted had wickedness thrust upon them by their opiate-happy doctors and the globalists.
There must be 'opiate dealing suprepredators' profiting from the decay of society in the white areas too, no? Overdoses from prescription drugs have been more or less flat since ~2006 (figure 4) so someone is dealing street drugs. Why don't we talk about them?
Progressives sympathize with blacks and sneer at rural whites. Conservatives...sneer? look down on? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my impression is that they look down on poor black communities and sympathize with rural whites. I don't think their plights are identical, but I'd argue that there are significant parallels and that should be reflected in our discussions about them.
Watched this the other day and it was wild. It's remarkable how much better substack and randos on youtube have become at informing us about the world relative to the MSM. I feel better informed about the violence in Chicago after 20 minutes watching that than years reading bullshit takes from both sides of the aisle.
That first sentence contains multitudes. You say Appalachian whites were flourishing and had it snatched away by the globalists, progressives would say that in the era Appalachian whites were flourishing, Blacks were still overtly being discriminated against. Each of those arguments deserves an essay that I probably couldn't do justice.
That being said, there were significant numbers of black workers in the auto industry, the other big employment opportunity often brought up in the context of globalism destroying American middle-class communities. 20% of Ford's workforce between 1920 and 1950 according to this source, although it seems too high and I can't really find a corroborating one (this article cites the same number).
I don't know, nor would I even be sure how to answer that question. Do massive farming subsidies to the Midwest count as equivalent to the projects? What about the fact that, ironically, roughly a third of the State budgets of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are federal aid? It's not clear to me if your point was that America invests more in the rehabilitation of poor inner cities relative to the rust belt or coal mining regions or something else.
There is a story that white families tell themselves about how their loved one was tricked into getting addicted by unscrupulous doctors, and that's why they went into a destructive spiral. Fetterman actually is running an ad implicitly accusing Oz of doing that in the PA Senate race. And that story seems to be mostly false. As you say, it's not an explosion of prescriptions causing the crisis. And there is a story that black families tell themselves, about how their family members were tricked into getting hooked on crack by the CIA or the government or the media or music, and that's why they went on their destructive spiral.
There is another point often raised, about how we assign harsher punishments for crack than for cocaine, and this has classist and racist implications. But there is a meaningful difference there that comes from the actual class difference. A trust fund brat who develops a coke habit might take five years to snort their inheritance up their nose. A lower-working class guy who starts doing crack might be missing rent next month. Middle and upper classes have more slack to endure the externalities of a severe drug addiction. They have a longer lead time and more offramps before they get to the point of committing property crimes against strangers.
And more importantly for this comparison, they have stronger, richer personal networks to prey on. From what I've seen in person, a heavy pill addiction can easily run $100 a day, at roughly a dollar per mg. That rate of capital outflow will ruin a family. It's a cliche. "They both have good jobs, how are they having money problems?" The answer is that one of them has a drug problem. And when they run out of personal slack, they take advantage of family members, lie and steal and cheat and defraud. The lower-class crackhead turning predator looks like a string of robberies and break-ins and muggings. The pillhead looks like "Aunt Debbie says to watch out for cousin Phil. Apparently he stole a ton of money from Uncle Sheldon, yeah, drugs."
No one really wants to tell Aunt Debbie and Uncle Sheldon that their son Phil is a miserable piece of shit. It's easier, kinder, less awkward, to blame the big evil pharma companies.
I think you need to flip those in this sentence. Otherwise, you're good.
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