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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29092 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I came across today a movie trailer today which is/was The American Society of Magical Negroes. It really showed me how much the elite black class is grifting. The story apparently revolves around black people using magical powers to keep white people from chimping out and attacking black people. I'm not going to sit here and say black don't have grievances in America and against whites, but I don't think this whole type of thinking helps blacks. It makes it clear to me (and many other instances obviously) that the black elite and black academics define themselves against whiteness. Like they can't imagine blackness without white people in America. An America with no racism against blacks isn't possible to them, and the DEI and all that kind of stuff is necessary to keep them safe. This leaves many kinds of positions for more or less grifting that are basically only open to blacks and leave them a position to cry about racism and also benefit from it handsomely in terms of salary.

Working in Silicon Valley has given me the opportunity to work with a bunch of Nigerians that make insane salaries and live luxurious lifestyles. One thing I've noticed from them is that they don't think about the black/white distinction the same way. At my current company, the director of security is a Nigerian and half of the staff is Nigerian. Obviously they are hiring their own ethnics at a preferable rate, but I haven't seen one of them be part of the "Black at XYZ Company" groups or really care about that. They actually seem to be pretty happy with the current state of affairs in the US an have integrated pretty well.

I'm going to sound like a boomer conservative here, but it seems to me black elites in America seem obsessed with keeping the race divide front and center and their bloated salaries are a direct benefit to them. I don't think that black performance or lack thereof has anything to do with racism. I've never met a single normie person that is anti-black and hates them. I myself am pretty racist and HBD minded and I don't hate blacks at all. I find ghetto criminal blacks to be a nuisance and I don't like that, but even I would have to admit the vast majority of blacks are just normal people who want to live their lives and be happy. When I lived in Chicago, other than a few really unsafe areas I didn't mind walking around majority black neighborhoods.

It seems to me that there is an elite black class that was raised on the Civil Rights movement that can't move on. Their world view of racism is hopelessly outdated and most people would be fine hiring blacks and living near them. However, as currently constructed there is an elite black class that wants the status quo because they benefit from it Being a civil rights activist and a socila justice advocate is beneficial for these people instead of telling blacks they can succeed or fail on their own merits and to just be normal Americans.

Meanwhile, American Fiction looks like it might actually be pretty good. Jeffrey Wright is a good actor, and the premise looks kind of fun.

It also looks stupid and it was made 20 years too late. It is critiquing something that doesn't exist anymore. It reminds me of the Baudrillard quote "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce." Except in this case, it's a movie the elite black gifting class and white libs would make about themselves. The bottom line is white libs are dying to make movies that make black people look good in 2023 and promote them to positions that they aren't qualified for. Now a real subversive movie would be about a black guy who keeps getting promoted to more and more important positions because white people are scared to disagree with him so they don't get called racist. Then he causes a huge problem maybe even a Dr Strangelove type ending. That shit would be funny.

Me, I'm waiting for the movie about the black guy who keeps getting asked to participate in diversity stunts by white libs and gets progressively more irritated with them. This used to be a comedy staple in the 2000's.

I have nothing to add to the discussion, but I found out about the movie myself through a promoted tweet recently, and in the name of sunk costs I'm going to quote some of the replies.

"Uhhhhhhhhh never mind, dammit can we not have stories focused on white people. My dumbass thought this was gonna be black Harry Potter"
"Hollywood doesn’t know how to make black lead films without making them about white people."

"Woulda been a fun chance to make a movie about a magical society of wise, semimystic black people strategically deploying to change people's lives. "

"Looks like they botched it. Would be much better if it was a group of heroes that did true MN stuff, like a janitor offering uncannily wise advice to a troubled guy working after hours at the office"

"Learning about magic just so you can end up being a side kick for some other guy to get the girl you like. Idk what’s worse - the person who wrote that as the pitch or the people who green lit it"

"The plot is that black people exist to make white people happy and the black guy has to get the white girl???? This is all kinds of cringe wtf"

"Aw man. The story is bout the worst type of negro possible: a light skinned SIMP"

"they couldn't make it anything funny or cool because key and peele already did a sketch about it"

"Quentin Tarantino makes better black films than black writers and directors."

"DamnI didn’t realize the klan was still making movies"

"This movie seems racist to both White and Black"

"Not to be racist or anything but this seems like it's funded and supported and written by Jews"

"You mean they're not fighting the Grand Wizard of the KKK?"

"I was thinking they had to stop like a rouge member from giving white people bad life lessons but this does seem way more boring"

Since the initial promoted tweet was negative, it's not surprising that the replies are too; but it does make me wonder whether there's anyone with a positive view on it. The only theory I saw for who the target audience is was "The aim is to show it overseas and make asia think white people are evil".

There is a saying that Black people are America's divine punishment for slavery, and these sorts of threads make me believe it more and more. It also has the curious effect of pissing basically everybody off, which is another reason why I like it.

A similar statement is variations of “we should have picked our own cotton.” See, for example, the confusion, indignation, and pearl-clutching going on in this Straight Dope thread from the prehistoric days of 2006 over a bumper sticker.

Man, the confederate flag has really taken a nosedive in terms of cultural... something.... over the past decade or two, hasn't it?

"I think the African Slave trade on the American continent was the most abhorrent mistake ever made by European civilization." Anakin face.

"Because of the human rights violation, right? ... right?"

This is how you get both sides to believe "A huge portion of modern day America's problems are due to the legacy of slavery".

And the problem is that subculture of America will carry that attitude with them wherever they go, and allow it to define the approach to all of them problems. Not a useful paragon for making progress it seems to me, but it's doubtful that that's what any of them want in the first place.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with there being a substantial rent-seeking black leadership/sinecure class, and that this isn’t in any way unprecedented(ancien regime France had a vast class of people who enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle for doing nothing, as do gulf Arab countries today), and that these people are a net negative to the community.

But, I think it’s worth pointing out that normie blacks don’t look up to these people, they look up to celebrities. Obviously cribbing celebrities is a bad idea for the general public even with celebrities that are generally decent role models(eg the NFL players that get a kissy face article every year about being a family man who serves as a deacon in his church and personally sponsors a food kitchen), because most people are not celebrities. The conservative solution to this is to hold up Ben Carson and Herman Cain instead, which is predictably not going to work. And the liberal solution is to try to make it about racism, which is basically a non-problem.

these people are a net negative to the community

I want to say that it's actually not bad if you have the elites of your society freed from labor to actually do the work of being elites. It's a natural specialization and a good thing both for the elites and the people they administer. Pretty much every successful empire has this going on. You don't want the people making the big decisions to get lost in the petty details. For everyone's sake.

The real problem is that these people want this status without doing the work or having the abilities required of an elite class, let alone any love for the people, loyalty to the nation or what have you.

Were this black american pseudo-nobility mostly made of Clarence Thomases, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

The real problem is that these people want this status without doing the work or having the abilities required of an elite class, let alone any love for the people, loyalty to the nation or what have you.

This mentality also finds itself at home with privileged, white and entitled libertarians who want to enact a world where the market solves all problems, and you think you can do away with politics entirely. It's a worldview that says I have no obligations to others, if I can get rich nobody should bother me. It's quite striking how much they idealize the worldview that animates the underclasses and third world countries of the rest of the planet.

Libertarianism does not say you have no obligations to others. This is a ridiculous strawman.

(It does say that your obligations to others are limited, which bleeding-heart liberalism and progressivism do not, but that, as they say, is a "feature")

Libertarianism does not say you have no obligations to others. This is a ridiculous strawman.

Is it? I got blasted pretty hard every time I introduced the concept to PCM. Humor aside, you got better quality political discussion there then you did in actual political subreddits. Maybe not to someone like you who has a more sophisticated understanding of it. But to the rebellious young adults who protested Jesus in the household and found their new Bible in "Man, State and Economy" with an Internet connection, they 'absolutely' think that, and will explicitly tell you as much.

Libertarianism does not say you have no obligations to others. This is a ridiculous strawman.

Have you read any of Bryan Caplan waxing about his "beautiful bubble"?

Instead, I pursue the strategy that actually works: Making my small corner of the world beautiful in my eyes.

Yes. He calls the world outside “dreary, insipid, ugly, boring, wrong, and wicked”, but adds that “Trying to reform it is largely futile” and implies he has no obligation to waste his efforts.

By declaring effort largely futile, he makes it clear any predictably unsuccessful attempts would be mere signaling of “caring” without real effect.

Sure, community organizers not needing a day job is a sign of societal wealth more than anything, but these people don’t do anything to help their communities, they just stoke racial tensions and grift.

That's because a money grab will always be easier and more gainful to an opportunist, than putting in the hard work of being productive and trying to align incentives in your community.

Pointing out the problems of the people you're surrounded by and live amongst never earns you any friends, but only contempt. Telling people there is no magic bullet to solve their issues, you have to stop being an entitled single mother, you have to go to school, you have to keep your house in order, you have to conduct yourself morally and be an upstanding citizen is a recipe for making enemies with the people you're trying to help. People don't want to hear it. And this is no different with almost any other negative social feedback loop out there. If I get on the podium in a presidential debate and say I'm not going to solve all your problems. This is a generational issue. It took us half a century just to get where we are currently and will take decades to give what my constituencies what they are asking for. Now vote for me. Do people think that'll happen? No. They'll settle for a liar who makes false promises and delivers mediocre outcomes.

That's a pretty bold statement.

Black elites make me dislike black people. Seriously it is very annoying how often they spread ungrounded hate about people that look like me.

I would very much dislike if someone like TNC moved next door to me. OTOH, if it was Glenn Loury I’d be excited.

Unfortunately Glenn Loury is smart enough to know what he'd be getting into, which is probably why he stays out of the center of it.

The film is overly hyped imo, though that might be because I have had all morally spooked notions like fairness and equality beaten out of me by the mere act of observing how the world works. The lines about white people just bounced off me. I no longer expect to be seen as anything other than an oppressor at this point.

The worst thing about this film is that it's a romcom (and therefore an automatic 0/10) wearing the skin of something far more interesting. If black people have magic and thus are able to do anything they want, why do they devote substantial amounts of time to keeping white people happy when they could instead

  • establish a concealed, seperate society like the wizards have done in Harry Potter, or

  • BTFO the white muggles with magic and create their own nation?

If black people have magic and thus are able to do anything they want, why do they devote substantial amounts of time to keeping white people happy when they could instead

This same criticism was aimed at Black Panther's Wakanda, which apparently sat back with its advanced technology and hid from the world, allowing centuries of horrific abuse of other black people. I find a lot of fantasy-mixed-with-the-real-world fiction like this perplexing for these reasons. No one seems to have really thought about or grappled with the premises beyond the initial concept.

This reminds me of long arguments I used to have with a not-even-crypto HBDer on reddit (he was just politely not bringing it up too much because I was clearly refusing to even consider it). He also had this theory that, with enough successful African migration, the unity of the black elite, and thus the black grievance industry, would fail.

I, ironically enough, was the cynic even then- having seen how African migrants assimilate to "blackness" in my own family.

Obviously they are hiring their own ethnics at a preferable rate, but I haven't seen one of them be part of the "Black at XYZ Company" groups or really care about that.

What about their kids?

If it isn't just culture, even the kids of highly selected African migrants'll revert downwards. Then they'll face the same fight to get into the same elite spaces as the other elite blacks...where well-meaning progressive whites have made it clear that emphasizing victimhood is the path forward if they want a spot, even now since SCOTUS struck down race-based AA but explicitly allowed schools to take struggling with race into account.

I'm not making that argument to be clear. I want net negative black migration. I would deport all of them today if I could. I'd drive them to the airport.

TBF he did float (willing...lol) repatriation of Italian-Americans so I don't think it was his first plan so much as his hope. As I said, he was polite.

It was just funny how an American can be pessimistic about so many things except that, the power of US cultural hegemony wielded by his enemies.

Yes. It’s true that first generation African immigrants often have their differences with African American culture and society, but in the second generation they largely assimilate.

Black American culture (and specifically entertainment/hood/rap culture) is the highest status culture among young African elites. The rich kids of Lagos and Johannesburg try to dress, speak and act like successful US rappers. Black Americans are the richest and most successful black people in the world, you get wealthy kids of African families sent to European boarding schools but they try to put on an AAVE accent, wear hood gold chains, aspire to (or indeed do) own a garishly colored Rolls Royce or G-wagon and so on.

Black American culture is essentially a mind virus affecting the world making people intentionally act dumber and less pro-social. I've seen the same in the UK and Ireland with poor whites it disgusts me that this type of culture is going global. I actually did the same myself in high school listening to Bay Area rappers and acting like I was from Oakland.

I've seen the same in the UK and Ireland with poor whites

Which is interesting because black culture derives a lot from Ulster-Scots borderer culture in the first place, (hence the many comparisons between poor white rural culture and poor black urban culture in the US sharing so many norms) the poorer half of my own family in Northern Ireland have very similar honor culture based beliefs and behaviors as do my black American wife's poorer relatives. The specifics are different (dog fighting vs badger baiting, joining the UDA/UDR instead of a gang, 1619 vs 1690) but the behaviors driving it are the same.

ADOS culture is itself a mish-mash of the only cultures they were able to see around them, given their original cultures and beliefs were stripped away. Which is why black soul food is basically just southern cuisine and so on (fried chicken is believed to have come from Scots immigrants in the first place) and both AAVE and Ulster-Scots share the "habitual be" linguistically.

I suppose it does mean that if black culture does get a foothold in the South of Ireland, then we Ulster-Scots will have finally won that particular culture war in a roundabout way.

More seriously, the fact that the UK is just re-importing the behaviors of troublemaking types who moved to America in the first place is kind of elegant. Though I would point out it isn't necessarily less pro-social in either the Ulster or black variants. It simply has a much more restricted ring of who you regard as part of your society. It creates tight networks within groups who may be targets from other groups. Which is less adaptive than say the more WASPy behaviors of the other side of my family in a modern context, most likely. But is very adaptive when your group is in a potentially precarious position.

People claim that Black Americans act the way that they do because of Scots-Irish but are there any New World Black cultures that don’t have an honor based intra-personal culture?

For example if I go to Haiti do they have a dignity based culture? What about say… Jamaica?

The homicide rates seem to suggest that’s not the case.

The Caribbean did in fact have a not insubstantial population of Scots-Irish laborers, indentured servants and overseers on the mostly English owned plantations. As well as ne'er do wells from Southern Ireland who were exported there by the English. To the extent that St Patricks Day is mixed in with some slavery abolition holidays there.

Having said that, the claim that black American culture is heavily influenced by Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish doesn't mean Caribbean culture having similar outcomes in the absence of such influence, invalidates the first. I am sure the French have their own equivalent of borderer culture, and it seems likely that those employed as direct slave overseers were likely not the their equivalent of WASPs. Indeed the divide seems very similar with the Anglo Cavaliers and Scots-Irish borderers having the same dynamic as the grands blancs and petits blancs on Haiti. Aristocrats and muscle, to reduce its complexities.

As a note, it may well be true that the original cultures would also have been heavily honor based, and this indeed seems likely. But in America at least, those were mostly washed away and replaced.

Old country Cajuns will sometimes quietly claim partial descent from Haitian whites(usually through Jean Lafitte's crew), which is a datapoint in "French overseers in Haiti were relatively honor oriented and clannish".

As a non-American, the blacks have no one to blame but themselves. No, I am not being unnecessarily harsh on them or anything of that sort. Why the fuck does someone have to "make it out of the hood"? Just literally walk out of the hood. There are for hire signs everywhere and just start working a minimum wage job. Done, you're out of the hood! If you are not braindead, sit for the SAT, and then go to community college -> a state university, student loans are a thing, right?

If a group of people can't make it in the US of all places, there is NOTHING, NOTHING you can do for them.

And of course, grifters gonna grift. Is their grifting feeding the cycle? Probably, but its probably a coup complete problem at this point.

Uh, you don’t take the SAT to go to community college- you register with a high school diploma or a GED, everyone with one of the two gets in. As an American familiar with the systems that exist to help upwards mobility, that just took me out of believing your rant. An associates degree from community college is affordable, even on loans, if you live with your parents the whole time(if you borrow to cover living expenses it’s still crippling because cars and apartments cost the same whether you’re going to Harvard or a community college).

My "rant" has no personal details so you can believe it based on its object level claims. Also sorry for not having your countries high school completion certificates memorized im pretty sure you know about other countries specific documents as well. In simpler words, who gives a shit? u know what I meant.

In simpler words, who gives a shit? u know what I meant.

Too much heat--better to step away from the conversation than let others get to you.

The problem with "just literally walk out of the hood" is something that applies not just to African-Americans, but poor people of various stripes around the world: family. One of the major reasons given for why poorer people have poor spending habits is that if you are known to have any money available, your kin will come to prevail upon you as to why they need some. If you "make it big," every auntie and half-sibling and unemployed cousin is going to come begging for a little help. Unless you're willing to simply cut ties with your entire family — not an easy ask for anyone (save maybe the most atomistic of WEIRDs) — your success is mostly going to be eaten up by your extended clan, often making it not worth the effort.

Plus, there's also violence affecting family as well. You can work your way up, get into a top university, get married, become a respected judge or an english professor, live in a nice LA neighborhood, send your kids to private school… and then, one day, your nephew back in "the hood" in Philly has pissed off the wrong bunch and now has to come live with you for awhile.

To get out of the trailer park my dad joined the Marines and has since lived at least 10 hours away from his hometown in the rust belt, returning to visit maybe once a decade. Other than his mom, the one functional aunt, and intermittent periods of contact with/enabling of some cousins (including a cousin who came and lived with us Fresh Prince style for a few years) who lost their dad he has almost nothing to do with them.

It was an ugly disappointment coming from the white trash bullshit from my mother's side (See, even if you escape it's possible to wind up jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.) to find out for myself that dad's side of the family is pretty much the same thing with more drugs and prison sentences, all the way down to both sides having a cousin named K who lost custody of her kids due to drugs.

Plus, there's also violence affecting family as well. You can work your way up, get into a top university, get married, become a respected judge or an english professor, live in a nice LA neighborhood, send your kids to private school… and then, one day, your nephew back in "the hood" in Philly has pissed off the wrong bunch and now has to come live with you for awhile.

I never saw Fresh Prince from Uncle Phil’s perspective like that. A superb illustration of your point!

This makes me wonder if the WASP superpower really was the nuclear family, in which the only "close" family to which you owe substantial loyalty is your parents, children, spouse, and maybe siblings. This is often criticized as being excessively atomistic and promoting anti-social attitudes around individualism and intergenerational social responsibility, but the contrast as described above seems like it has even worse tradeoffs.

I’ve heard this expressed pithily as “one of the worst things about being poor is having to live alongside other poor people.” It sounds cruel and god knows there are plenty of rich arseholes but my friends from genuinely deprived backgrounds seem to have to endure a huge amount of interpersonal drama with family, from people needing to be bailed out (literally) to female relatives or friends needing help after getting beaten up by abusive boyfriends or spouses or friends stealing from them. Even if not all poor people have high time preferences and low willpower, the large majority of people with high time preferences and low willpower end up poor, and make life miserable for others in their community trying to escape.

Years ago I had reason to hear a one-hour job overview, from the head of security of a vast consumer goods warehouse. Security...they're worried about stealing stuff, right? Somewhat, but mostly it was the employees creating a giant, ongoing soap opera.

Even if not all poor people have high time preferences and low willpower, the large majority of people with high time preferences and low willpower end up poor, and make life miserable for others in their community trying to escape.

There is also, I think, a psychological addiction many people have to familiar environments, so a person who grows up around the physical and emotional chaos of poverty will in some way continue to crave that chaos in their life even if they have the will power and conscientiousness to move themselves out of that environment. It will be a constant struggle for them to not fall back into the "comfort food" of the bad life decisions that were normal during their formative years.

One of the worst things? It is absolutely by and large the worst thing if you're living in the west. There is like no comparison at all.

Yes, it was likely different when 95% of people were ‘poor’ and only 5% had any money at all, but in the developed world where ‘poor’ generally refers to the bottom 20% you’re going to see very high correlation with low conscientiousness, high time preference etc.

Why the fuck does someone have to "make it out of the hood"? Just literally walk out of the hood.

I think this is probably much easier said than done. You know how it's pretty easy for the average kid of 7 or so to learn a new language, but it's much harder for most adults?

If you grow up in the hood, by the time you develop any sort of adult-style self-awareness, you might already be fucked because you just spent your most formative years getting conditioned in really unproductive ways.

Add on top of that there is the violence that is common in the hood. It's probably pretty hard to focus on productivity if you regularly hear gunshots when you're lying in bed at night. I think that high levels of exposure to violence also tend to put people into a near-permanent fight-or-flight mode in which it is difficult to focus on any future further ahead than maybe tomorrow.

I think that some social justice activists are really doing the wrong thing by making it seem like it's all the fault of the white man, when in reality many of the problems of black communities are mainly caused by other black people.

However, I'm not going to blame some kid who grew up with a single mother in a violent inner city neighborhood for not having the sort of psychology and life skills that the typical kid who grew up in a healthy family in a safe neighborhood will tend to have.

I think you're making his position a little too strong. First, he never said it was easy. Secondly, there's no guarantee of success for anything you do in life, but you try and seize the opportunities that are available to you, and if they aren't there, you do your best to create them. That's the formula for every community out there.

Like you, I wouldn't fault a kid who grew up in the hood for being the kind of person he is, beset with all the influences he grew up around. I fault him for not trying to do something about it. It's the same reason I roll my eyes when I see people complaining about "the economy" and how "poor" they are, but it's a really odd thing to have observed. I've never seen a self-described "poor" person who 'didn't' have a smartphone. These are the kinds of people who live to the maximum of their income, and have worse "lifestyle" inflation than the economy has "monetary" inflation. When you're eating your meals from a crockpot, working 2 jobs, and are paying your bills before you pay for anything else, you then have a 'right' to complain about how bad things are. I feel bad for impoverished communities who are casualties of the system despite their best efforts. But I have zero sympathy to give whatsoever for the ones that don't even try.

A smartphone with internet access is table stakes for societal/economic participation these days, and doesn’t even cost that much, especially if you buy it used. Have you been to a third world country lately? Even poor tuk tuk drivers got smartphones.

Which is not to say the people you describe don’t exist. Just that having a smartphone isn’t a great identifier for them.

But I have zero sympathy to give whatsoever for the ones that don't even try.

Regardless of how hard you’re trying, it’s legitimate to complain that the economy is worse now by giving you less in return for the same amount of effort as you’ve put in before.

Your life isn't going to end without blowing your payday the latest and greatest.

Regardless of how hard you’re trying, it’s legitimate to complain that the economy is worse now by giving you less in return for the same amount of effort as you’ve put in before.

Not if complaining about it comes at the expense of your willingness to participate in fixing it, which let's be serious here for a moment, most people don't. Most people are spectators in their own lives as the days pass them up. They are not people who become vested in taking command of their own existence and do something to improve what's lacking in their lives.

That may well be the case, but is there a strong correlation between people who complain and people who work to improve their circumstances? Certainly some amount of people scrimp and save more, or work a second job, in order to adjust to changing economic circumstances, all the while complaining that this is now necessary for them to survive.

I've never seen a self-described "poor" person who 'didn't' have a smartphone.

I'm poor (particularly right now), and I don't own a smartphone — just a $8/mo. "Obamaphone" subsidized flip-phone that's something like a decade old.

I see someone watches Jesse Lee Peterson.

Poor people of course exist. Most of the people living the high life in the urban cities who burn their paychecks within a day of getting them are going to have a hard sell of it, in tying to convince me.

Jesse Lee Peterson

Never heard of him. I'm just disabled and living on various government handouts (and currently fighting with Social Security over my SSI due to issues from the COVID days, along with them counting among my assets a bank account that literally doesn't exist).

I'm going through a massive haggling of my own with the government at the moment. It's quite sad how the law protects criminal behavior from being exposed by those who would seek to do the right thing.

I think this is probably much easier said than done.

Who said anything about it being easy?

I'm making an observation about the micro, not the macro. And macro observations should not be prescriptions. Statistically most people can't actually lose their weight, however that is terrible advice for an individual.

In the US it is feasible for one individual to make it out of the hood, is it realistic? No.

You know how it's pretty easy for the average kid of 7 or so to learn a new language, but it's much harder for most adults?

Usually this is because adults don't need it. If I throw you in china or korea without google translate - you will learn fast. I know this because my father learned two languages at the age of 55 in the 90s when his job wanted for him to live in a different country.

A lot of adult immigrants who would really benefit from speaking good English struggle with it, though. Latinos can get by fine in most of the Southern US, but if you’re a 50 year old Cambodian or Turk or Russian you’d benefit a great deal from fluency in terms of both jobs and daily life, and yet those people often never learn good English. Before she died my 103 year old great grandmother still spoke in pretty broken English with a strong German accent after like 80 years in the US. And she wasn’t a SAHM, worked various retail and clerical jobs in the 60s and 70s but had limited progression because of language, would definitely have benefited from fluency.

I agree that extremely motivated people dropped into a totally foreign culture are forced somewhat to survive (although many do so barely to the level where they can buy food and work - if necessary - the most basic job) .

Why the fuck does someone have to "make it out of the hood"? Just literally walk out of the hood.

I don’t disagree, but it’s important to remember that Trumpists seethed when Kevin Williamson suggested that poor whites in shithole parts of the US do the same thing and said their suffering was their fault if they didn’t.

Many poor people can move for more opportunity but choose not to.

Trumpists are the same as hood Blacks. They are populists who lack principles, their policy positions are motivated by the wellbeing of their group and not society as a whole. Majority low IQ stock both of them.

However one is paraded as massive sociopolitical issue whilst the other is not, so perception/discussion will be downstream of that.

They are populists who lack principles, their policy positions are motivated by the wellbeing of their group and not society as a whole.

I wish the sorts of characters you're referring to in these groups were motivated by the wellbeing of their group(s), because that's at least a perspective you can negotiate with. If that is their motivation, they're observably doing a terrible job of promoting it. Instead, I think Hanania gets it right in describing them as an oppositional culture.

Thereby showing that what's going on here is not a "black" problem but a "pampered westerner" problem. The US is legitimately the easiest place in the world to "make it big", and no, Europe isn't better, there is less inequality but the upper ceiling is so much lower that it's legitimiately harder to get paid the same amount in PPP dollars there than in the US.

there is less inequality but the upper ceiling is so much lower that it's legitimiately harder to get paid the same amount in PPP dollars there than in the US.

Why do you say "but" when those are the same thing?

There is less inequality in Indonesia than the US, but it's much harder to get paid US$30,000 PPP adjusted in Indonesia than the US.

Whereas if it were easier, higher achievers would tend to earn more, increasing inequality. What am I missing?

Not necessarily. Consider two societies. In A people either earn $100k or $50k or $20k, each is equally likely. In B people either earn $150k or $160k and each is equally likely. In this case everyone in B earns more than everyone in A, even though B has a lot lower inequality and it is a lot easier to make $160k in society B than society A, despite A having greater inequality.

You can also have the opposite situation, Consider B' where everyone either earns 15k or 16k except for one person who makes $50k. B' has basically the same level of inequality as B (if the population size is large, the single person making 50k won't change total inequality by much) and this level is lower than the level of inequality in A. However it's still a lot easier to make at least $50k in A (2/3rds of the population does it) compared to B' (only one person does it), despite B' having lower inequality.

I have underestimated the complexity of the question and your preparedness to consider it in detail. I idly wonder whether there are any real-world circumstances that would make those distributions likely, but I'm not willing to press the point.

I think the point is that western societies have enough of a de facto floor that inequality is mostly driven by the ease of reaching an upper middle class salary.

The UK is particularly bad here. At this point I’m no longer shocked by how much American friends make compared to British friends in similar jobs, often 2-3 times as much.

Thankfully high finance is one of the few places where we still have our compensation tied to US levels instead of UK wages. The tax rates and what we get in return for what we put in (less than what a normal earner gets) still make me seethe with rage though.

I'm going to sound like a boomer conservative here, but it seems to me black elites in America seem obsessed with keeping the race divide front and center and their bloated salaries are a direct benefit to them.

Um, yeah. No kidding. It's been that way since at least the 70s. Read "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers."

I think the more interesting question is, why is it this way? Why is this so effective? Are blacks just better at politics? Are whites just cowards? Are whites secretly masochists who enjoy being hurt?

Not trying to troll here, these are genuine questions.

Working in Silicon Valley has given me the opportunity to work with a bunch of Nigerians that make insane salaries and live luxurious lifestyles. One thing I've noticed from them is that they don't think about the black/white distinction the same way. At my current company, the director of security is a Nigerian and half of the staff is Nigerian. Obviously they are hiring their own ethnics at a preferable rate, but I haven't seen one of them be part of the "Black at XYZ Company" groups or really care about that. They actually seem to be pretty happy with the current state of affairs in the US an have integrated pretty well.

Yup. It's uncomfortable for either side to admit this, but wokism is a Western value.

Yup. It's uncomfortable for either side to admit this, but wokism is a Western value.

There's plenty of random Affirmative Action in the developing world, but a lot of the ones who end up in the West tend not to think highly of it since they're the successful Market Minorities getting screwed over in their own countries.

The Greeks were not woke. The Romans were not woke. The Franks were not woke, nor the French, English, German or Spanish empires. Nobody was plausibly woke up until around 200 years ago and even then they were very dissimilar to modern wokists.

And those societies have basically nothing to do memetically with the modern west, those places are dead and buried now, no different to how Akkad has nothing to do with modern Iraq.

nothing to do memetically with the modern west

There are fasces in the US Senate Chamber. The US is a republic, some consider it a democracy. Where do you think these words come from?

I'll keep going. We have the Latin alphabet. Roman numerals are still taught in schools. Classical architecture. The Julian calendar. Half the world uses civil law derived from Rome, Anglos use common law from England. We talk about legions, Caesars, Platonic ideals, de facto vs de jure, e pluribus unum, the Olympics, Nike, Achille's heel, Odysseys...

There's a hell of a lot more continuity from Greece and Rome to us than Akkad to Iraq. The Chinese go on about their 4000 years of history (with very little to show for the first 1000 years or so), we have at least 2500 years. We are capable of far more than this present malaise.

And everything you mention was adopted by the modern West well before progressive wokism came and took over everything. The modern west was given these things as a gift from the past, not as something it choose for itself from a bunch of options after considering the pros and cons.

The Modern Progressivism which rules the roost in the West is its own beast, it is Western only to the extent that it was born in the West and naturally some of the norms prevalent in the area rubbed off on it, it is no more Western than it would have been Chinese if it emerged in China nstead of the First World and spread to everywhere else from there.

There is a saying that Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire. Western history includes all of the things you mentioned, but the modern west has lost the Mandate of Heaven that was given to Leonidas, Pericles, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Octavian, Marcus Aurelius, Justinian, Charlemagne, Otto, Andrea Doria, Napoleon, Bizmarck and Disraeli. That mandate is now accorded to us, to the elite immigrants who were raised and imbued with the same memeplex that gave rise to western Greatness in the first place and which the modern west has willingly and of its own accord repudated.

You are right that eventually what made the West great will come back to power, but its champions will not be the pale skinned whites who came to reject and squander the gift they had but rather people darker in complexion yet just as steadfast and principled as the greats of the days of yore.

Much like the Jews in the time of Christ, you have twisted the teachings you were given and shirked your responsibilities, instead becoming venal and corrupt. You are no longer the chosen people. And just like how Christ drove the money changers from the temple, we too will drive you out and restore the West to its former glory.

How can you say that when you’ve already failed at colonizing your own country while on easy mode?

Your fantasies are entirely dependant on the fertile ground that exists in the west.

the elite immigrants who were raised and imbued with the same memeplex that gave rise to western Greatness in the first place and which the modern west has willingly and of its own accord repudated.

You are right that eventually what made the West great will come back to power, but its champions will not be the pale skinned whites who came to reject and squander the gift they had but rather people darker in complexion yet just as steadfast and principled as the greats of the days of yore.

What are the great achievements that make your coethnics specifically worthy of carrying the mantle of my civilization? Getting someone to be CEO of Microsoft (a company founded by Gates and Allen) doesn't quite cut it. How about founding some great companies, creating great new ideas, success in war?

If it's even possible for foreigners to uphold the values of our civilization, it's definitely Chinese and not Indians who'll be doing it. TSMC, Nvidia, Tencent, DJI, Huawei, BYD - actual global companies leading in high technology, founded and run by Chinese. The Chinese military gives our leaders sleepless nights. China is roughly 15-20 years ahead of India too and won the last war between the two countries. They fought well in Korea too. You're even using a Chinese concept right now, the Mandate of Heaven.

Furthermore, China makes no pretence at appropriating another culture, I recall the Chinese ambassador telling the Japanese that they were always going to be Asians. China has some authentic pride in their own traditions and national achievements, rather than trying to dress up as us.

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-diplomat-tells-japan-south-korea-theyll-never-become-westerners-2023-7

We need no achievements. You threw away that particular mantle yourself and we have just laid claim to it, no different to how once you throw something away as trash other people are free to take it for themselves. Plus the person who founds a company/idea etc. is not necessarily the same as the person who makes it a success, see Steve Jobs, Elon Musk etc., they didn't discover any of the ideas they made their success on the back of, but they were the ones who propelled the ideas into greatness, and that is something we do far better than the Chinese, see how you have tons of Chinese at lower levels of pristigious firms, but the more you go towards the top the fewer of them and the more of us you find.

Furthermore, China makes no pretence at appropriating another culture

It's impossible to win with you, first when we say we'll keep our own culture thank you very much you people get angry and say we should assimilate with the west, replacing our Chandragupta Maurya with Lucius Junius Brutus, our Rumi with Chaucer and our Vishnu Sharma with Aesop.

Then when we accept it and become more westernised than even you are you turn around and then start complaining about us appropriating your culture and values and taking it for ourselves, even though that's exactly what you were saying you wanted us to do in the first place! What is it exactly that we should be doing? Should we be becoming more Western or less?

who propelled the ideas into greatness, and that is something we do far better than the Chinese

China is a superpower, I think they know how to do implementation better than India. There's not a single Indian company on the level of the big players in China or Taiwan, producing new creations. That's why you're not listing them. I looked around, apparently Indians have founded or cofounded companies worth $430 billion in the US. Huang founded Nvidia with two whites, it's worth 1.2 trillion. And then there's TSMC, possibly the most relevant company in the world, founded, staffed and run by Chinese.

https://www.globalindiantimes.com/globalindiantimes/indians-usa-founders-companies

Where is the Indian Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Elon Musk? The richest Indian built and runs a petroleum refining conglomerate which is good but not a grand civilizational achievement.

first when we say we'll keep our own culture thank you very much you people get angry and say we should assimilate with the west

When did we say that? Did the British aggressively try to Anglicize India? With about 1000 bureaucrats in the Indian Civil Service? They built some railways, suppressed sati, manipulated trade and that's about it. India was ruled overwhelmingly by Indian officials and nobles.

become more westernised than even you are

You are absolutely not more Western than me, as I have shown above. You don't understand Western culture beyond knowing an impressive number of names, you think there's no continuity from the foundation of our culture to the present day. You can't dismiss 80-90% of our history and say you're more Western than a native.

If you're going to have so much pride, you should back it up with great achievements, tangible proof of how your nation upholds the mantle of Western civilization.

More comments

We use the Gregorian calendar now. To my knowledge, only Orthodox Christians still use the Julian.

The Gregorian calendar is basically the same as the Julian calendar but for a tiny change in the leap year rules.

And IIRC using the pure Julian calendar is a fringe position among orthodox Christians- most of them use some kind of ‘revised Julian’ calendar that in practice is just the Gregorian calendar for everything except Easter.

And even the use of the Julian date for Easter in the West is solely to accommodate the Russians, who stick to the Julian dates for religious feasts. I’d assume if the Russians ever adopted the Gregorian dates the whole orthodox world would just move the Easter date too.

Really, the whole calendar dispute could make for an interesting effortpost, it’s grounded in the same “we don’t let the Pope tell us what dates to use” stance that motivated a lot of Protestant states to stick to the Julian for years, even centuries. The English wanted to make their own Protestant calendar with 33-year rotations. But eventually they all acknowledged the astronomical superiority of the Gregorian and adopted it. As the Orthodox world wants to do, Russian obstinacy and anti-occidental stance notwithstanding.

The levels of Wokism as seen in the US? Sure.

But I assure you that we have a sizeable number here in India, both aligning with their American counterparts and adjusting for local conditions. We had Social Justice movements for decades, for our own "systemic disparities", but of course the matter has been inflamed as yet another portion of the American memeplex uncritically imported to these shores.

Well, at least they don't run things for the most part.

The original justification for the SC/ST stuff was certainly a kind of progressive leveling ideology around class and race inequality by Westernized Congress elites.

But the system remains because simple ethnic/caste spoils logic makes it politically impossible to remove. Nigeria is in a similar position. In India, even the BJP doesn’t dare end affirmative action for fear of angering its own lower caste voters. Modi isn’t a firm believer in western progressivism, but he knows he can’t remove the policy. Aren’t like 75% of Hindus included in reservation now?

The US is different, black people are only 14% of the population and most elite Hispanics (ie the rest of URM) aren’t strong affirmative action / DEI activists even if they somewhat support it. Affirmative action in America isn’t a political necessity, it’s an act of charity engaged in for ideological reasons.

Most black normies don't expect to benefit from AA either. AA is purely a benefit to the black overproduced elites in competing with Jews and Asians. There's a very small percentage of the population that benefits or expects any benefit and summing it up as the 12.5% that's black is massively overstating it- it's a single digit percentage.

I think it’s a political necessity in the sense that one of the political parties needs it to maintain its present coalition.

Incidentally, what’s the AA situation in Nigeria?

The only reservation category that covers the majority of Hindus is the Economically Weaker Section category, and the benefits pale in comparison to SC/ST/OBC status, at least when it comes to big ticket carve outs like education and government jobs.

Beyond that, sure, I agree that AA is hopelessly entrenched here. The only way I see it being eradicated would be the hilarious situation where just about everyone and their dog is covered by something, such that there's no significant benefit from it. The EWS, well it's not quite there, maybe if the 80% who got it got an 80% reservation in jobs and education as opposed to 10%. But even that's highly unlikely, we're stuck in this equilibrium for the foreseeable future.

How is it uncomfortable for either side? It's been an anti-woke talking point since day one, though it proved to be rather impotent in the face of naked power.

Because the right likes to talk about preserving Western values and resisting changes to our culture and how immigrants need to assimilate etc.

There's Western values, and then there's Western values. That the intersectional-subversive-pomo memeplex emerged from the West is no secret to anyone who wants to preserve the traditional Western values, and there's no contradiction or even tension between wanting to oppose said memeplex, and wanting immigrants to assimilate.

The only people who might have trouble reconciling these are white nationalists, who have to come up with a way to blame it all on the Jews.

This might all be true, but it smacks of blaming cartels for smuggling drugs into the U.S. Sure, they are the ones literally bringing it over the border, but they don't do it because smuggling is an exciting challenge, or because they want to spread the Gospel of Heroine, they do it because there are a lot of American citizens who really, really like to snort coke and smoke meth. So it is with the black grifter class. If white Americans ignored them, they'd have close to zero power. But high-status white Americans are dying to hear about the latest totally real hate crime or revisionist history or whatever masochist nonsense, so the black grifters are just supplying where there's demand.

It seems to me that there is an elite black class that was raised on the Civil Rights movement that can't move on.

Even worse, there's also a PMC-elite white class who not only was born too late to get covered in the glory of the Civil Rights movement, but who also was born with the original sin of Whiteness for which there is no final atonement or forgiveness. And unlike the black elite, this is the class that controls our institutions.

Right, as soon as the black mascots they hire start saying the wrong things, they're immediately oatracized. Their blackness is worth nothing unless they are telling white liberals what white liberals want to hear. Their power is largely illusory and dependent on the supremacy of liberal whites.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? Can you name me some examples of black DEI hires/commissars who “started saying the wrong things” and were ostracized for doing so? What is it that “white liberals want to hear” against which specific progressive black activists have transgressed? And what were the penalties for doing so?

This case comes to mind:

Compact Magazine: A Black DEI Director Canceled by DEI

This month, I was fired from my position as faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, Calif.—a position I had held for two years. This wasn’t an unexpected development. From the beginning, my colleagues and supervisors had made clear their opposition to the approach I brought to the job. Although I was able to advance some positive initiatives, I did so in the face of constant obstruction.

What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.

My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice. On the contrary, I was informed during the interview process that the office I would be working in had been alienating some faculty with a “too-woke” approach that involved “calling people out.” (After I was hired, this sentiment was echoed by many faculty, staff, and administrators I spoke to.) I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role. I was wrong.

Of course, most of the time people who disagree with core SJW tenets don't get hired for DEI positions in the first place. This case is unusual not in that they demanded ideological homogeneity, but in that they didn't demand it as part of the original hiring process. Plenty of academic institutions now require diversity statements from prospective hires for any position, let alone positions related to DEI, statements evaluated in a way that would probably exclude someone like her if she was open about her beliefs.

Also in Cupertino

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