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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   18546 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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There are not actually very many German-Americans that would burn much mental energy on a maritime dispute between Germany and Sweden. Perhaps a century ago, but then ethnogenesis happened, and now German-Americans are simply Americans that enjoy Oktoberfest slightly more than the median. Omar is distinctly not-American in a way that is simply not true of Americans of old German stock.

now German-Americans are simply Americans that enjoy Oktoberfest slightly more than the median

Very true. German-Americans coming to Germany stick out as entirely American with nothing German about them.

So either their good German blood was diluted, or being German is a cultural categorization rather than a biological one.

From personal experience, I would say little of Column A, little of Column B. It's true that I'm not entirely German, depending on a few ancestry gaps that I'm not clear on, I'm in the ~70-75% range, with the rest being mostly old stock English. But really, I don't think it's that genetic distance that makes it visually obvious that I'm not a real German - you can tell from posture, from movement, from other subtle visual queues that I really can't even describe. The inverse of this is easy to see if you go to California - it's trivial to tell the difference between Asian immigrants and Asian-Americans before they ever say a word. I've always thought this was a pretty neat part of culture, that it's not just norms and preferences, but carries all the way down to unconscious movement patterns.

Also, Germans are just very... German. I'm distinctly a Midwestern Amerikaner, not a real German.

Oddly enough, some Midwestern women still seem very German to me, even the younger ones. Partly this is physical appearance, but also certain almost indescribable mannerisms, such as their quiet and careful speech. In contrast, I have never met an American man who seems German, even if he looks like something out of a "Visit Niederdorla!" catalogue.

Those Germans became full americans because of heavy assimilative pressure, not because of the action of time.

I know you don’t disagree with me. But on the eve of WWI support for Germany was a meaningful force in US politics and it took coercive assimilative pressure to stop. This will not happen for Somalis, and I feel like making that point, specifically. When will Minnesota make it illegal to speak Somali in schools?

I'm bordering on shitposting here, but it amuses me to think about Woodrow Wilson the son of Southern Confederates getting his revenge on stalwart Republican Germans.

The (arguable) long-term realignment of both sides of the Civil War into the Trump coalition is something to behold. I say this as an upper Southerner whose classmates frequently wore Confederate flag T-shirts while being blissfully unaware that their ancestors hailed from the most Unionist part of my state.

That image doesn’t quite work since the Germans were still a very heavily Democratic constituency on the eve of WWI. In fact, Wilson’s about-face (campaigning on “he kept us out of war” and then entering it against the Germans) was one factor that led the German-American vote to become much more Republican.

Examples of heavy pressure:

  • 30 Germans were killed by vigilantes
  • Hundreds were beaten or tarred and feathered
  • Thousands of Germans were interned in both world wars.
  • German cultural expressions were actively repressed with things like a machine gun being taken to a Milwaukee theater to cancel performances of William Tell, states banning education in German, discrimination against people and places with Germanic names (which is why those surnames asound Jewish today they came after the Germans had changed their names to English sounding surnames).

Yes, we are on exactly the same page. When I say "ethnogenesis happened", what I really mean is that the door was slammed on immigration for decades, two World Wars applied aggressive coercion against sympathies for homelands, and multiple generations of time passed with ethnic intermixing and population migration.

I am of the stance that all government materials should be printed in English with no exceptions. People that cannot communicate in English are choosing to be not-American. Forcing them to adopt English (or at least for their children to) is for everyone's betterment in the long run.

ethnic intermixing

Was it eigen or one of the other little tpots who was postulating that that might be a non-trivial component of increased divorces in America? Interracialethnic marriages with very different cultural norms/lifestyle expectations being less stable than the intraethnic marriages that were the norm prior to the great wars.

Exactly.

Most people (probably even here) naively assume that the US is one uninterrupted string of mass immigration since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.

But of course that isn't the case.

Most recently, immigration was at very low levels for 40 years from 1924–1965 with strict limits on the national origins of immigrants. It was during those crucial decades that most of the hyphenated Americans stopped being Italians, Irish, and Polish and started being just regular Americans.

There are far more Somalians in Somalia than there are in the US and almost all of them would rather be in the US. We need at least 40 years to assimilate the ones we already have before letting more in. There is unlimited demand for migration, but the the US has a very limited ability to assimilate newcomers.

(or at least for their children to)

I thought second-generation immigrants nearly universally spoke English natively, with the possible exception of some insular religious communities like the Amish. Are there notable exceptions that I'm missing?

I flat out don't believe that based on my experience with second generation Hispanic immigrants, who data suggests are one of the better assimilating groups.

The explosion of ESL classes in public schools suggests otherwise.

What explosion would this be?

Googling around, combining this piece and this piece, I get about about 8.1% of public school students were ELLs in 2000, 9.2% in 2010, 9.5% in 2015, and 10.3% in 2020. That seems like a quite slow and gradual increase over the last twenty years - hardly worth being called an 'explosion'.

There's more data here - the vast majority, over 75%, of ELLs are native speakers of Spanish, which suggests to me that we're mostly talking about migrants from South and Central America. I'd guess that the slow increase in English language education is probably just a result of the rate of immigration from Latin America increasing.

I see no evidence that the very modest increase is driven by second-generation immigrants living in ethnic enclaves and refusing to learn English. It seems entirely understandable if it's all first-generation.

EDIT: Wait, let me get this straight.

First person makes a huge and unsupported claim in one sentence.

Second person questions that claim, providing hard data that seems to contradict it.

The result is that the first person is upvoted, and the second person downvoted? What? What happened to rationalism? I don't think I was rude in any way - I was asking for evidence for a claim.

Maybe it's just a perception issue, since my state is top 10 in ELL. The two most populous states, California and Texas, are also the two with the highest proportion of ELL students.

By gross numbers you have a 35% increase over 19 years.

As for your edit, this isn't the rationalist thread, it's the culture war thread. We're at least three steps removed from rationalism by the time you've reached here.

It needs to happen for the Mexicans before it needs to happen to the Somalis, but we simply don't have the will to do it anymore.

I have the will, but I don't have the allies.

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