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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24720 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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Cocacolonisation at work?

Or, why what happens in America is (unhappily) a big deal globally

This is Black History Month. How do I know this, since I'm not an American and this is very much an American, indeed a North American, indeed a USA American invention?

Because the classical music station of our state broadcaster is currently celebrating it, for the second year in a row.

What does Black history have to do with Ireland, given our demographics (data from the 2016 census as the ethnicity report from the 2022 census isn't out yet)?

Ethnicity Ethnic composition “White Irish” remains by far the largest group, accounting for 3,854,226 (82.2%) usual residents. This was followed by “Any other White background” (9.5%), non-Chinese Asian (1.7%) and “other incl. mixed background” (1.5%). The 19,447 persons with Chinese ethnic/cultural background made up 0.4% of the usually resident population, while those of mixed backgrounds (70,603) constituted 1.5%.

Birthplace The vast majority (94.1%) of White Irish people were born in Ireland. Of the 5.9% (226,078) born elsewhere, 121,174 were born in England and Wales and 53,915 were born in Northern Ireland.

Over one in three of those with African ethnicity (38.6%) were born in Ireland (22,331 persons), along with 31.3% (2,126) of those with “other Black backgrounds”. Among those persons with Chinese ethnicity, over half (55.7%) were born in China, with 8.3% being born in Malaysia and 6.4% born in Hong Kong. Of those with “Any other Asian background”, 22.4% were born in India, followed by 16.1% in the Philippines and 13.7% in Pakistan.

But hold hard there, the Republic of Ireland is no longer nearly 100% milk-bottle white! We have Actual Real Black People living in our cities and towns now! So why shouldn't the state broadcaster recognise our diverse citizenry?

No problem there - except that the black people in Ireland are from Africa (mainly Nigeria), black British, Afro-Latinos, etc.

One in three of those with African ethnicity (38.6%) were born in Ireland (22,331 persons), as were 31.3 per cent (2,126) of those with other Black backgrounds.

The remaining Africans were born primarily in Nigeria which accounted for 27.2 per cent. Those of “Any other Black background” were born in a range of countries including Brazil (17.4%), England and Wales (7.1%) and Mauritius (3.2%).

But the musicians, singers, composers being celebrated for Black History Month are North American; today, for instance, the clip was about Robert McFerrin (father of Bobby).

I'm happy to learn about African-American musicians, but uhhhhh.... why are we learning about North American and not, say, Malian griots or Malagasy valiha players, since those are much more relevant to the black people living in Ireland? Part of it is probably that the snippets are shared from American sources, and that for mixed race Irish people they would more naturally look to Britain and the USA. So we get Aretha Franklin and Scott Joplin, not Rakotozafy.

But it's a great (or terrible) example of America being the cultural 800 lb gorilla. Our betters have decided that now we are a socially liberal multicultural modern economy country, we must celebrate diversity and inclusiveness. Which means the American version of same. Why aren't we getting Asian History Month, Polish History Month, etc. programmes? Well, I'd love to know the answer to that one myself.

Huge pet peeve of mine. I've written about it here, here and here.

RTÉ delenda est.

Our betters have decided that now we are a socially liberal multicultural modern economy country, we must celebrate diversity and inclusiveness. Which means the American version of same. Why aren't we getting Asian History Month, Polish History Month, etc. programmes? Well, I'd love to know the answer to that one myself.

Short answer: the Irish PMC consumes so much American news and entertainment media, and spends so much time on American social media, that they have come to believe that, on some level, they actually live in the US, and any issues which are assumed to be important in the US must be equally important in Ireland.

What's RTE?

Raidío Teilifís Éireann ("Radio Television Ireland"), the state broadcaster.

Black history month is not for black people, it's for white people. It's for whites to celebrate non-whiteness. What matters is how whites see non-whites, and they see them mostly through American media. By "whites', I don't mean people with light skin, but rather a certain class of people--mostly light-skinned--who are very profoundly conscious of "race". Black history month exists because white people demand it, but this weird fact is just more obvious in Ireland than in the US.

If we use SWPL as a working definition of who is white, then the biggest beneficiaries of Black History Month are black-skinned white people. I am half-serious about this.

I would be interested to know the actual reason for why things like this happen - like, for instance, is your local radio station copying content from some American station, and doesn't have the infrastructure to come up with their own content that month? Is the person in charge of programming at your local station just so culturally Americanized that this seems natural to them and they can't think of why it shouldn't be this way? Do they think that their audience is sufficiently Americanized that they'll be interested in this content?

Because yeah, this does seem pretty silly, but as an American I really have no idea how or why these things happen in other countries. I don't actually really want American culture to have this much influence around the world, including the cultural and political elements I like and agree with, a lot of it is so specific to our history or politics or other contingent factors that I wouldn't expect it to be useful elsewhere unchanged.

Whilst I profoundly hate that the West has taken to celebrating a racist holiday -- And specifically hate how easy it has been to convince people to do it -- it still seems a bit silly to criticize people for worshiping the holy ethnos wrong.

Aren't they more right to worship the mythical American negro instead of whatever sort of real people exist in the actual country they live in? After all this is a holy celebration of the former, not the latter. The sort of people who are in position to celebrate black history month do not give a slightest fuck about Africans qua Africans. Most likely they don't even know anything about them. But they do care a lot about having those fancy values from America about being antiracist and intersectional and inclusive and progressive.

This was never for or about anybody from or living in Ireland. You are specifically worshiping Americans and the glory of their current empire. Trying to spin it off to your local real people is a futile attempt at subversion. At best you're just signalling you're not on board with the program completely. Which is the most dangerous place to be, ideologically speaking.

Are the people erecting statues of George Floyd in Afghanistan actually more clear minded than people like you who notice that it doesn't make any sense? I'm not even sure at this point.

Aren't they more right to worship the mythical American negro instead of whatever sort of real people exist in the actual country they live in?

I would have said it's typical college student white liberal activism, though some of the people involved appear to be mixed race. But it makes no sense to celebrate black Americans, for 'now that we have our own black population', given that most of the black people here are now coming from Nigeria.

It makes no sense except as copying the Yanks, which makes the entire bit about "black people living in Ireland" nonsensical, as it's got nothing to do with the black people living here who come from Brazil and Nigeria, not the USA.

You are specifically worshiping Americans and the glory of their current empire.

Let's be blunt, that's it in a nutshell. But objecting to that would be racist, because we're celebrating Black people, so how dare you point out the contradictions?

I still find this criticism very weak. The few black people I've interacted with have all, without exception, been Americanized just as much as our white liberal activists are. Even more so, to some extent, since they are actively looking for black American culture. There is no hint or trace of them being from Ghana or Kenya, despite some of those guys having lived there for 10+ years before coming to my country.

Why wouldn't black history month in Ireland or wherever else celebrate the biggest cultural icons that actually resonate culturally with black immigrants? They don't consume media from Africa. They consume black media from America just like everyone else.

Beyond all of that the key line to point out here is that ingroups and outgroups always come first. Black people living among white people see themselves as different. The lives of blacks in Ireland have much more in common with blacks in America than blacks in Africa since blacks in Ireland are dealing with the same outgroup in similar conditions. That struggle resonates and relates both emotionally and physically.

If you in any way cared about privileging the position of blacks in any country you should immediately go to the winning formula. Which is the US one.

They consume black media from America just like everyone else.

A quibble, but many young black people in Ireland have great admiration for black British rappers like Stormzy or Dave. Ireland even has a thriving drill scene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A92_(group)) which draws as much, if not more, influence from UK drill as from Chicago (which is even mentioned on the Wikipedia page for UK drill).

And where do black British rappers get their ideas from? The idea of 'British rap' is inane. The poetry and rhymes can be British. Or stuff like Cockney. 'British rap' is American. From the song structure, lyrics and style to everything else.

That seems awfully pedantic. Hip hop may have originated in the US but that doesn't mean it can't be reinterpreted in other cultural contexts to the point of becoming a distinct genre/cultural form.

No one would say that anime is an American artistic medium just because many of the earliest anime artists were inspired by Disney. No one would say the French nouvelle vague is really an Anglo-American movement because many of the directors were inspired by Hitchcock, Welles and Jerry Lewis. If you want to claim there's literally zero musical difference between Dizzee Rascal and Snoop Dogg, well, I don't know what to tell you.

No one would say that anime is an American artistic medium just because many of the earliest anime artists were inspired by Disney.

Thank god no one said that.

If you want to claim there's literally zero musical difference between Dizzee Rascal and Snoop Dogg, well, I don't know what to tell you.

No one is saying that and you are being a little shit throwing these irrelevant arguments at me. There are 'differences' between American rappers in the US that dwarf whatever differences there are between most UK and US rappers. That doesn't change the fact that 'British rap' is completely derivative of US rap. From being a thug to singing a sob song about being black and oppressed.

Maybe instead of bringing up a bunch of irrelevant things that would make your point if they were similar to what is actually being talked about you should look at the thing actually being talked about and recognize just how derivative black 'British rap' is from US rap.

you are being a little shit

You are banned. Based on past warnings and bannings, let's go with 14 days this time.

Fuck off and don't call me a little shit

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This is Black History Month

No it's not. Black history month in America is February. Look it up

Seemingly we adopted it in October. Why? I have no idea. Some bunch in Cork back in 2010 for some reason, seems to be as far as it goes:

According to Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute: “Black History Month Ireland was initiated in Cork in 2010. This location seems particularly appropriate as, in the nineteenth century, the city was a leading center of abolition, and the male and female anti-slavery societies welcomed a number of black abolitionists to lecture there, including Charles Lenox Remond and Frederick Douglass.

“Following on in this tradition, University College Cork recently joined the international Universities Studying Slavery consortium. Amongst its concerns, this project addresses historic and contemporary issues regarding race/racism.”

That makes even less sense for a Famine museum (or whatever it is) to go jumping on the bandwagon, but I think the clue there is UCC: college students copying American radicalism.

Why October instead of February? Not a clue.

Why October instead of February? Not a clue.

It's part of the same grift, just a step further along than the Americans. If they did black history month in February everyone would say 'haha barmy americanised amadans, they're just copying the yanks the eejits*!' But since they did it in October, they generate interest, people bitch about it on social media and argue about it, and say 'hey dummies, black history month is supposed to be in February!', legitimising black history month as a concept.

*to be sure, to be sure.

Also there is the long running joke that the American black history month is in February, the shortest month of the year. The Irish are giving it a month with the full 31.

Was this whole thing just a marketing campaign by the Cork Tourism Board that got out of hand?

That makes about as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.

Why does a country which doesn't have a significant black population and no colonial history whatsoever dedicate a month to celebrating the achievements of people who have more melanin than the average? What could be behind this particularly strange new custom?

Maybe if we unlock the key to this mystery, we can then explain why the Japanese love baseball. I always felt the two questions intimately related somehow.

But as you soundly point out Japanese teams don't play in MLB, so we'll probably never figure it out.

I always thought the Japanese love of baseball was a holdover from the post-war American occupation. But Ireland was never formally colonised or occupied by the US, so the influence of American culture on Irish society has always been faintly baffling to me in a way that the historical influence of British culture certainly isn't.

the influence of American culture on Irish society

My own idea is that it's our history of emigration. The "American parcels" from family members in the USA sending home second-hand clothes etc. for the family at home. The remittances. The 'returned Yank'. American politicians doing trips back to The Ould Sod (Biden was the most recent). The people going to the US for summer jobs (and maybe overstaying the visa). Britain is closer, sure, but there's not the same historical resentment of 'former colonial power' for the USA. All this on top of consuming exported American culture the same as the rest of the world.

Not to mention the J1 visas. I'd never thought of that angle.

But it's not just that - I've met my fair share of housebound autistic neurotic woke shut-ins who seem to have never ventured beyond the Pale and who speak in a manner indistinguishable from their housebound autistic etc. equivalents on the other side of the Atlantic.

I always thought the Japanese love of baseball was a holdover from the post-war American occupation.

People expect that, but it isn't actually, predates it by a century. And there were professional leagues in the 20s long before the second world war.

You had people saying "the game spread, like a fire in a dry field, in summer, all over the country, and some months afterwards, even in children in primary schools in the country far away from Tōkyō were to be seen playing with bats and balls." as far back as 1907

We had a big presence in Japan for a while after they opened up to us:

Horace Wilson, an American English teacher at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo, first introduced baseball to Japan in 1872, and other American teachers and missionaries popularized the game throughout Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. Popularity among Japanese grew slowly and led to the establishment of Japan’s first organized baseball team, the Shimbashi Athletic Club, in 1878. The convincing victory of a team from Tokyo’s Ichikō High School in 1896 over a team of select foreigners from the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club drew wide coverage in the Japanese press and contributed greatly to the popularity of baseball as a school sport. The rapidly growing popularity of baseball led to the development of high school, college, and university teams throughout Japan in the early 1900s.

Ironically, while we already had pro teams, it sounds like the American org that became the MLB was only established in 1871, so our love of the sport really doesn't predate theirs by all that much.

Another interesting thing is that baseball was quite popular in England for a time before it faded away.

Rounders (the version of base ball that was codified in Ireland in 1884, so well after the Kinckerbockers codified American baseball and around the same time that the NL was formed) was one of the big team sports for schoolgirls in the UK (alongside netball and field hockey) and Ireland. It only went into decline in the 21st century once there was a serious attempt to push women's cricket.

TIL that the claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball was a myth created to refute the idea that baseball was derived from rounders. Unsurprisingly, the truth is that both games derived from informal "base ball" games with uncodified rules that originated in England and were played across the English-speaking world - similarly to how Rugby, association football, and gridiron all developed independently from uncodified proto-football.

You're right, it's absolutely fascinating that baseball was ever popular anywhere.

Wow, I had no idea, that's really interesting!

Hey, Scott Joplin is great, argreed the rest of it is Americanised BS, but I guess colonies of the Empire must suffer the mandatory public venerations of IVPITER and JUNO...

JUNO

IVNO

My bad, don't know how I missed that.

IVPITER

IVPPITER

Romanes eunt domus!

People called 'Romanes', they go the house?

When I was looking at schools for my son in the UK, one of the easiest tests was looking at the Black History Month displays. If more than half the historical black people in the displays were American, I could cross the school off the list. (We cross-checked with other criteria - I was actually surprised just how perfect the negative correlation was between having posters of Rosa Parks and MLK and being an appropriate learning environment for a high-functioning autistic boy).

It is bananas when you consider who the actual black population of the UK and Ireland are. I'd really like to learn more about African music, and any continental African composers/musicians/singers in the Western classical tradition, but nope - you'll get Scott Joplin and like it!

And okay, Scott Joplin is fine, but for somebody from Nigeria, what has a black American to do with their history?

In all fairness, black American cultural exports are highly popular and influential in Africa.

And even more so in the Caribbean. Even in the 1980's, the dream of a sporty boy in the English-speaking Caribbean would have been to get picked for West Indies and beat England in a cricket Test match. Now he would want to play in the NBA, and unsurprisingly Windies suck at cricket.

When Black Panther came out in the UK, I found the racial politics of it to be cringe - Africa is a country and the global centre of Black culture is South Central LA. But based on who was whooping loudest in the cinema, black Caribbean Londoners loved it.

A healthy addition to their family's endowment.

Alabama - Tennessee: Spending an afternoon with 100,000 members of the "grill" crowd.

I have been to several football games at "tier-2" SEC and Big 10 teams. This was my first visit to one of the college football elite. This was a fanbase that has exacting expectations for their team. It was also one with a nervous edge: Alabama had suffered a home loss to Texas and had looked vulnerable in several other games. Like most SEC fanbases, several hours of lubrication had preceded the kick-off. It was a loud, rowdy, yet very focused crowd. Even in the interior areas, the fans would yell "Roll Tide"; the large concrete hallways providing amplification and echo.

Unsolicited, a mostly-sober Alabama fan engaged me in single-sentence conversation: "Our girls are so much hotter than theirs". When I declared my neutrality in the upcoming showdown, he said "oh, you're unbiased then. Aren't our girls so much hotter than theirs?"

In the SEC, people dress up for games. The sorority girls especially dress for display, revealing and augmenting what is typically already top-tier aesthetic qualities. As one large banner hung on a House, re-affirming my previous encounter, "our girls are hotter than UT's!". Several of the sorority members gyrated on the porch as living proof. These girls are secure in their identity: in their looks, their social networks, and their sorority (and these three are all heavily correlated).

In five years, these girls will be wives. They will be more mature and less wild; dressed to the nines but more modestly. In ten years they will have two or three kids. Their beauty will be diminished but they will have found new identity in their children, husbands, and school social networks. They will still faithfully attend games, raising up the next generation of die-hard Alabama fans.

During the game, a particularly enthusiastic fan behind me shouted encouragement and tirades in full volume and with little let-up. Somewhat ironically, his pejoratives for the UT fanbase centered particularly on their inadequate cultural sophistication, with "podunk" and "redneck" frequent descriptors. To one slightly effeminate student he yelled "you should get a Bud-light". With his accent, appearance, and bearing he was almost a perfect Hollywood caricature of an Alabamian. During a momentary lull in the action he let me know he was pursuing his master's degree.

Most of the fanbase was well educated and well-off. While there is a joke that only 10% of Alabama fans actually attended the university, the majority of those in attendance had certainly had a college degree and beyond. The cost of a game is prohibitive to all but the most connected or wealthy. While I didn't pay for my ticket, parking, or the tailgate activities rumor had it that the per-person cost was well into the 4 figures. No one even blinked at the 15 dollar stadium beer.

When Alabama scooped a fumble for a score to clinch the game, the crowd went berserk and the stands turned into a party. After the extra point, the loudspeakers played Garth Brook's "Friends in low places" and the entire crowd sang along, locking arms and swaying back and forth. Cigars starting being lit, and soon the stadium was filled with haze.

I was swept up in the post game excitement. The student body was crowding into the bars and restaurants to continue the celebration. Those of us who had driven to the game meandered back to our cars, knowing that traffic was going to be a disaster regardless of when we left. Along the way, I passed Greek houses where the real parties were at, though even the standard student housing appeared to be holding impromptu parties in the stairwells. Somehow a female Tennessee student made it into an Alabama dorm and yelled "Go Vols" at passing pedestrians. One incredulous fan yelled back "you lost!".

As Scott Greer would say, these fans are economically upper-class economically but who enjoy low-class activities (at least, as defined by our cultural elites). Yet is the tailgating culture truly low-class? The catered food at many tailgates is provided by top restaurants, there is typically at least one very nice liquor, and the cigars were ubiquitous following the victory. I saw an Audi R8, tricked-out trucks costing upwards of six figures, and campers that cost the equivalent of a small lakehouse. In addition, these are people who simply know how to have fun, and do so with enthusiasm and no excuses. There is self-awareness but no navel-gazing. These are people who know who they are and take pride in it.

As Scott Greer would say, these fans are economically upper-class economically but who enjoy low-class activities (at least, as defined by our cultural elites). Yet is the tailgating culture truly low-class? The catered food at many tailgates is provided by top restaurants, there is typically at least one very nice liquor, and the cigars were ubiquitous following the victory. I saw an Audi R8, tricked-out trucks costing upwards of six figures, and campers that cost the equivalent of a small lakehouse. In addition, these are people who simply know how to have fun, and do so with enthusiasm and no excuses. There is self-awareness but no navel-gazing. These are people who know who they are and take pride in it.

There's an element of the old classlessness to American culture that haunts some places still. Especially places where the local whites have roots stretching into the antebellum era, there is a cultural memory of a time when people at least took the idea that America shouldn't have social classes seriously, even it wasn't an idea that entirely panned out in practice. If you're middle class, you enjoy low class entertainment as almost a point of pride.

As a person who generally cheers for Alabama because my sister went there and she loves it, and I want her to be happy, I think this is a good post. I think what it encompasses is that going to an SEC football game is a genuinely amazing experience, and just objectively fun (for most people). And people who look down on such things are just playing into their own prejudices. If you think Bama football tailgating is low class, but enjoy a tv show like Scandal, Rue Paul's Drag Race, etc you are just a person who doesn't know thyself. Indeed, the tailgate is superior, because it involves social activity and has an appropriate level of music volume (contrasted with a modern bar, club, etc).

It is quite the experience. Stephen Fry had a show where he travelled around the US and in one episode he went to the Iron Bowl. His reaction was a blend of "I can't believe they're doing all of this for an amateur football game" and "This is amazing". I cracked up at the face he made when the fighter jets flew by.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8

I've never gotten to go to the Iron Bowl (my sister has), but I like that video because it shows that people are just having absolute fun, which is the heart and soul of college football. The host is doing a bit of fish out of water thing, but it is not nearly as condescending as you will often see. It is genuine and embracing of the fun. I think a lot of anti-college football sentiment is just culture war. 99% of people don't know the skill difference between CFB and NFL anyways. But the fun is the point. Some people hate the fact that other people are having fun they haven't sanctioned.

I was raised, and still live in, this culture, and I appreciate your write up.

Question from someone who doesn't understand US College football culture - you write about Alabama fandom being passed down families, but if you come from a family of diehard Alabama fans and end up attending some other school for academic or personal reasons, does your sporting allegiance change? And is it supposed to?

The only UK university sporting events with this level of interest are the (Rugby) Varsity Match and the Boat Race, and in both cases the partisan fans are alumni of the universities or residents of the relevant cities. I supported Oxford as a kid because both of my parents were Oxonians, but there was no question that as soon as I matriculated I would be rooting for Cambridge. (Not that it mattered much - my family are not really into spectator sport and we only watched the Boat Race because my dad was a rower in his youth.)

if you come from a family of diehard Alabama fans and end up attending some other school for academic or personal reasons, does your sporting allegiance change?

My mom's side of the family are all hardcore University of Iowa fans. Not a single one of them went to the University of Iowa.

If you grow up rooting for Alabama and go to a different school which is actually good at football, you become a fan of the new school. If you go to, say, a basketball school(American colleges which are particularly good at basketball and those which are particularly good at football rarely overlap, and it’s odd for fans of a football school to care overmuch about its basketball team and vice versa), then no, you don’t, at least as far as football is concerned. If your new school is a football school that isn’t a rival of Alabama, you root for your new team first, but you’re still expected to cheer on Alabama if you see them.

Now it’s worth noting that 1) all of this is specific to undergrad, if you grow up rooting for alabama, go to Alabama for undergrad, and the take law school at university of Texas your loyalty stays with alabama and 2) nearly all schools that are football powerhouses are regional generalist schools, although a few of them have better programs than others(like the aforementioned university of Texas at petroleum geology, for obvious reasons) they’re generally going to offer most majors.

If you grew up an Alabama fan and wind up attending an SEC rival like Auburn, your fandom is expected to change to your new school. If you grew up an Alabama fan and wind up attending a school like UAB, who's football tram is irrelevant, you are expected to remain an Alabama fan.

I've seen the same but with

Coming from the Southwest, my mother was complaining about Californians with their pushy driving and their big houses fifteen years ago.

But, still, my home culture is closer to LA than it is to Luisiana, not only geographically, but more deeply. The same Spanish Colonial influences, of course. No influential schools specifically for boys, or Blacks, or Catholics. Sprawling cities that expanded in the era of the automobile, with huge grids and wide lanes.

I'm unsure how to classify the apology and trust issue, but I'm not sure "California" is the right category. We don't like our new neighbor, who has been building a house next to ours, because he does things like helping himself to other people's stuff without asking, and embedding it in his fence. When confronted with this, he always deflects, never apologizes. He seems to have learned everyone's names and has been occasionally using them as a kind of weapon. We always feel extra angry with him after he uses especially our children's names. My husband is considering installing a camera just for him, because he seems untrustworthy. He has painted his new house primer gray over stucco, in a land of clay colored pinks and tans, with matching grey stonework (suggesting this isn't an oversight, it really will stay that color), and bulldozed all the shrubs in his yard. We call this behavior "car salesman," but it's not exactly that, either. I don't know if he's from California, but if so, it was a long time ago. I would like it if there were an accepted term for this, like "premium mediocre" for many things also popular in California.

Back when I was in youth group at a California feeling Evangelical church, some church members once recommended a book called TrueFaced (https://www.amazon.com/TrueFaced-Bill-Thrall/dp/1576836932), and talked about how it had been important and meaningful to them, as they realized that they had been living a lie all this time. They did not seem especially disoriented by that realization. My family was intensely puzzled by this (along with the popularity of things like Wild at Heart and The Purpose Driven Life, also out of California). I think this is related to the "privacy settings" issue, and also to pressure from many social groups to perform things like enthusiasm or conversion in order to experience belonging and acceptance. We once went on a youth group outing to a California theme park, where after riding roller coasters all day, we went to hear a sermon about "recommitting our lives to Christ" or some such thing. At one point, the speaker demanded that we should get up and go over to another area, so I did, and then got me to fill something out saying that I had pledged recommitment or something. Afterwards, I felt confused and ashamed. I got up because a leader told me to, and now it was supposed to be something deeply meaningful and personal? People with a deeper need for belonging and greater focus on adherence to social norms probably do bend their entire personalities around the expectation that they be in some constant state of Revival (or, now, of finding themselves, or therapy, of being Out, whatever their social group calls for)

Some years later, I was volunteering for a month at a youth camp in California. This time it was Eastern Orthodox, which even in California is more stately and solemn than frenetic and enthusiastic. And yet. They wore me out with constant demands to be more extroverted, more enthusiastic, to Experience Revival, to sing louder, with more energy, with frenzy, to compete for attention at each meal, for Fun. Californians, and California adjacent youth cultures, I think, do worship a minor deity of Fun, to which they make sacrifices.

Californians, and California adjacent youth cultures, I think, do worship a minor deity of Fun, to which they make sacrifices.

I think there's something to this. Movies and TV used to portray California (or LA specifically) as this little paradise of Cool Times, of good burgers and parties and going down to the mall with friends.

That doesn't sound realistic or like something to take seriously.

Re. the apology thing:

I've noticed that an apology is an admission that doesn't guarantee forgiveness; so forgiveness has to be given before the apology or the apology is pointless.

This is similar to how it was in my small jungle town in the middle of nowhere; where you needed an intermediary to be sure the beef was crushed before anyone tried to do any actual working it out so you didn't eg get beat with some horseshoes on the end of a chain.

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.

California's native stock is highly white. Its nonwhite % is increasing more than basically any other state, but California of 1980 was super white.

Prop 13 is also strangling the city and makes it impossible to enter the real estate market if you're not earning huge amounts of money. If you're a middle class Angeleno, resign yourself to living with your parents until they keel over and inherit the house (I hope you don't have siblings!), move out to bumfuck nowhere on the edge of town, or rent forever.

The eldest son inherits the title, and the younger sons go abroad in search of adventure. It has always been like that.

Not always. The Romans did not have a law of primogeniture for property.

In the modern era people usually expect to have their own place before getting married and having children. Good luck getting a wife when you live in your childhood bedroom.

LA was a majority white city until fairly recently. Whites were ethnically cleansed from LA by mass 3rd world immigration after WW2. These nonwhite people are a big reason for the way CA is. They certainly aren't voting for any Republicans.

The appropriate Vietnamese culture without any desire to be part of the Vietnamese

This is hilarious . Whites are supposed to integrate into parallel immigrant communities who arrived 2 generations ago?

This is hilarious . Whites are supposed to integrate into parallel immigrant communities who arrived 2 generations ago?

No, but if white liberals are going to go around sticking their nose into these communities and meddling, they ought to treat people in those communities as equals.

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.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Porcentage_de_hispanos_por_condado_de_Estados_Unidos%2C_1960.jpg Note that LA county is the unclear 25%+.

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.

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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.

Thanks! Well, it's only that heinous if it's about things like ethnicity that no one gets to choose for themselves---in the previous comment and I think most of the time it's used here, it's seems to just be based on who you're parents were instead of the alternative of which values and culture you choose to follow.

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."

I guess Im from the west coast. I actually live thousands of miles away.

I feel the exact same quirk about small city people but inverted.

They take themselves too seriously cant take a joke. Too submissive to arbitrary authority, etc.

I think the principle components are big city vs small city people. Or somewhere vs anywhere people.

You think people from the outskirts have trouble adapting to city life? IMO that is pretty much the norm. The reverse is almost always the issue.

Or somewhere vs anywhere people.

Yep, I think this hits the nail on the head. One of the defining features of liquid modernity, to me, is a total disregard for place. Physical locations aren't what matters at all. In fact it's seen as uncouth and ridiculous to care about the place you were born and grew up in rather than somewhere else.

For context, I'm a Southerner who moved to the Bay Area for school and has stayed here (mostly) since.

One interesting wrinkle is that I increasingly find transplants to California insufferable, despite being one myself. With a native San Franciscan, I can shoot the shit and be genuine; with a transplant, be they from NYC or Des Moines, it's this constant thinly veiled status game, which I'd link with many of the behaviors you'd mention.

I'd be curious if most of the California transplants you encounter were born in CA, or people who made a pit stop there to make bank before colonizing peripheral areas.

Also, Chick-fil-A is infinitely superior to Popeyes and it's one of the things I miss most here, Waffle House edging it out.

Ah, Waffle House. It's Denny's for people who can actually win a bar fight.

With all due respect, Bojangles is clearly superior, even when i was visiting Kentucky itself, the locals encouraged me to go there and not KFC. Also Popeyes here in the North-East at least is not great. Maybe I'll try it next time I am down New Orleans way and see if it is better down south. Chik-fil-A seems to be reliably good no matter where I get it from though.

I tried going to Raising Cain's in Chicago once, and I don't get it.

It seemed like perfectly acceptable chicken fingers, served in individual or party sized portions only, with no family sized portions on offer, and boring sides. Which seemed like it defeated the purpose of getting fried chicken, from my perspective. We stood there confused for a while, then ordered something, I think, but I don't remember if we actually ate it as a meal or not, and I don't think we ended up with the right amount of food. This is in contrast to, say, Cheddar's, which also has perfectly acceptable chicken tenders (possibly the problem is that I can't tell one acceptable boneless fried chicken item from another) in a bundle with better sides and croissants.

I wonder if it’s simply being a transplant that makes people obsessed with authenticity and one-upmanship.

I suspect it's one part trying to build an connection to the community (which anyone would want to do) and one part the type of person who is willing to move being more grounded in cosmopolitan values than local (including where they grew up) ones.

But surely you cannot deny that Raising Cane’s is better than both.

Wasn't big where I grew up, but there's apparently one in Oakland. I'll have to try it out!

They’re everywhere now!

It was an exciting and terrifying day when the announcement was made that, in the next year, they would be opening one less than twenty minutes away.

I remember when their initial expansion in BR was a big deal. They took over the building of a Fast Track my dad would often take me to. Now it’ll be dangerously within easy reach at an age when I should probably stop eating it.

What are the odds Waffle House lands in California this decade?

Mendacity and social fictions are not unique to Californians. Perhaps I've just been exceedingly unlucky in my acquaintances, and I'm suffering a Chinese Robber effect. But this pattern has repeated with enough frequency that I’ll tentatively call it a cultural difference.

Actually, when I moved to a midsize southern Californian port city in 2018, it was explained to me that the punishment for mendacity and social friction would be a one-way ticket to ... well, let's just say that the VHS tape I was given was of a once-great local news anchor named after a wine explaining that Californians accused of things like financial crimes, harassment, or petty theft might well be offered plea deals that include "a one-way ticket to Cajun country in lieu of jail time."

They're like the younger sons of European nobility who colonized the New World.

Don't forget the workers they brought with them: criminals who chose to labor as their farmhands over the noose; and others, in harder-to-fill positions, filled only after the "no thanks, I'll hang," phase of the recruitment flow was removed.

Also don't forget the religious whackjobs who just refused to let the King tell them who to burn at the stake.

Oh, and don't forget the squatters who broke into William Penn's summer estate.

Who would have ever thought that those three groups had enough in common to actually team up against their Monarch--let alone that they'd get help from Manhattan. You'd think people would be grateful to be liberated from being Dutch!

Oh, and Maine. Have I forgotten why the people in Maine joined the other twelve colonies--or did they keep their reasons to themselves?

Maine was not one the original thirteen colonies as it was part of Massachussetts at the time.

Oh, goodness, I was so busy trying to being clever I forgot to be smart.

I am honestly embarrassed about this. Mea Maxima Culpa.

I live in a midsize Southern port city.

I know you probably meant this faux anonymity as a joke, but it made me feel like I was watching the old SNL skit, Maine Justice while reading this post.

New Orleans is eccentric, even among mid-size Southern port cities. I suspect that many of these habits and mannerisms are widespread throughout upper-middle class rootless American white people.

The curious thing about Maine is that its most popular language after English is French. It makes sense being adjacent to Quebec but it's not a popular fact. (I remember reading this factoid about 10 years ago so maybe Spanish has now edged it out.)

That Walking Dead spin-off Daryl Dixon depicts this actually.

That's interesting. I've always thought Quebecois French was a more "open-mouth" dialect that Metropolitain French.

and do bizarre things like pour seasoning on the unpeeled bugs after they come out of the water - what is that about

WTF? People actually do this?

In any case, Californians are annoying, yes, and ‘Texan or Californian’ is a major division in my corner of Texas, it doesn’t seem quite as different- most Californians here are openly critical of California even if they have some difficulty assimilating. I’ve heard in Austin they’re worse than in DFW. Had no idea they were moving to New Orleans in any quantity- then again anyone I talk to from Louisiana is mostly rural(living in a place that can attract migration only from Mississippi).

My guess is, as Frequent_anybody refers to, that there’s both liberal California migrants seeking higher purchasing power, who head to Austin or New Orleans, and conservative Californians seeking less progressive atmospheres who are willing to assimilate and that this latter group tends to head to DFW and Houston.

I am from Chicago and don't know anything about boils. How should I do it if I want to replicate the deliciousness I experienced on the Gulf?

How to explain to a Yankee…

In normal cooking, you season the food and then cook it so that the seasoning on the surface seeps into the food. But crawfish and crabs have shells, so doing that would be like smearing ketchup over the wrapper on your McDonald’s hamburger. I’m sure it’s distinguishable somehow from not doing that, but it probably doesn’t have the effect you’re going for. Instead you season the water, then let the water season the food. To do that, you steep the seasonings in hot water, bring it all the way to a boil, and then add the food- crawfish and corn cobs and potatoes and sausage.

And obviously there’s ‘seafood boil’ mixes at the grocery store, but most people who learned from their grandpas don’t go strictly off of old bay even when it’s the base of the ingredients list. A ham bone, a few slices of lemon, some bay leaves, onion quarters, smashed garlic cloves, jalapeño slices- some things of that nature can go a long way. It seems like northern whites are usually too leery of spice when a bit of kick can really bring it together, and this is probably the root of the ‘white people don’t season their food’ stereotype.

Also, know your seafood. Shrimp cook dead but crawfish cook live, and crawfish that died en route to the water need to be thrown out(their tails are straight- the ones good to eat will have curled tails). Some things cook faster than others, too- alligator needs to be added well ahead of shrimp, for example. Your cooking temperature is 212 degrees(duh, it’s a boil) so times go off of that. The basic crawfish-precooked andouille or kielbasa-corn on the cob-potatoes mix is popular because it’s cheap, but also because the cooking times are similar(and the sausage won’t be damaged by reheating).

So, the theory seems relatively similar to pasta. There you have boiling saltwater that is disgustingly oversalted as your medium for cooking the pasta, and a bit of that penetrates when you cook with the salt water and you end up with properly salted pasta. The boil just takes this a step further by adding more flavors than just salt, because while with a pasta you usually are going to be mixing it into a sauce after its cooked to almost al-dente (and you finish in the sauce) you don't make a sauce at the end. I presume you just add butter?

WTF? People actually do this?

As someone who has done this before, here's the logic: Once they're on your plate, and you realize they're underspiced, pouring seasoning on the outside of the shells is the only thing you can do. The seasoning gets on your fingers and is transferred to the meat as you are peeling them. It's better than nothing.

That logic seems about as suspect as the story of a civil war soldier who was hit in the testicle by a bullet, which kept traveling, impacted a teenaged girl in the uterus, and then they married after she had a baby from it.

I think there are 3 types of California transplants. There's the libs who are leaving because it's too expensive and they try to turn their new place into CA. There's the opposite of this which are conservatives leaving CA who are very critical of CA and happy to be in a Red State. Then there's people like me who moved for a job and don't really care about the local politics because we don't plan on staying long (this is me).

I thing there's also a post apocalyptic Baudrillard type scenario for the libs in these scenarios where they want to be authentic and fit in but they end up creating a simulacra of the tradition without any of the gross and icky historical baggage. It's very off putting for anyone who remembers what it was actually like.

Sounds like your city is finally becoming (college) white. Of course, many white people aren't white, which is confusing, but they are easily identified.

https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

Third vote for Speaker of the United States House of Representatives set to start shortly.

What I'm hearing is the plan now is to do marathon votes, potentially through the weekend, as a strategy to wear down the holdouts and elect Jordan. I'm skeptical this will be successful. Allegedly some Republicans are saying they will go home for the weekend, Speaker vote or no. That is a bit of a sketchy place to be in because if enough go home (10) that means Hakeem Jeffries will be elected Speaker rather than Jordan. I imagine there would be some immediate votes to vacate the chair if that occurred but not sure how they would turn out. Also some Republicans have apparently been pressuring McHenry to bring legislation to the floor without a bill empowering him and he threatened to resign rather than do so.

ETA:

At the end of the third ballot results stand at:

210 - Jeffries

194 - Jordan

25 - Other

4 - NV

Jordan losing ground from the second vote as expected.

ETA2:

Reporting coming out of Republicans closed conference following the vote indicates the holdouts have no demands and want no concessions, they just don't want Jordan to be Speaker. If 8 people will never vote for McCarthy, 20 people will never vote for Scalise, and 25 will never vote for Jordan I'm not sure how this ends. One Rep was pictured carrying a resolution to oust McHenry as Speaker Pro Tempore. Maybe his replacement will be more amenable to doing legislative business without an empowering resolution? Apparently Jordan's latest vote total is the tied for the lowest in a vote for candidate for Speaker by a majority party since 1911 when the House was set at 435 members.

ETA3:

Jim Jordan has reportedly lost an internal ballot (88-112) and is out as Speaker Designate for the Republicans. As an amusing aside the 8 Republicans who ousted McCarthy have apparently circulated a letter claiming to be willing to accept some punishment like censure or expulsion from the Conference if it helped get Jordan elected. One problem? Rep Ken Buck has voted against Jordan all three times and apparently did not sign off on being included in the letter.

Apparently House is now going home for the weekend, lots more people expected to put their hats in the ring this next round.

Can anyone explain to me why this particular House speaker election is so contentious?

US political parties are really coalitions of factions and the Republican majority in the house is smaller than the smallest coalition. This makes each coalition is effectively the marginal vote required to elect a speaker and they're all trying to elect a speaker they perceive to be maximally friendly to their faction interests or extract maximum concessions from an unfriendly faction's choices.

Normally the way this is handled is back-room dealing where concessions are offered. Thing is, either the Freedom Coalition is intransigent, the mainstream isn't willing to offer them enough, or there's too much bad blood over the last time they got a deal which was then violated. Or all three.

because a few conflicts are coming to a head right now

there is a very slim majority in the House due to laughably idiotic behavior by Party leadership and the NRCC and a small group of representatives see this as an opening to attack two fundamental pillars of Congressional business over the last few decades+

  1. Dictator Speakership Era is in jeopardy - for the last few decades, the speaker of the house has had a shocking amount of power over the business of the house which almost entirely excludes the vast majority of the conference from decision-making and legislating.

  2. Appropriations going through non-Normal process - Appropriations bills haven't gone through the legislatively designated normal process of how they are supposed to be drafted and modified and on what schedule for decades. Instead, they're clusterfucked through another process which is likely illegal but which no court is going to stop it which ends in giant omnibus bills and other sorts of christmas tree bills. Instead of just passing the appropriations bills required by law through the normal process also required by law, they appropriations are done by Continuing Resolutions and giant omnibus bills.

The small group of GOP representatives were able to get concessions which should end the Dictator Speaker Era as well as the Omnibus/Continuing Resolution Era from McCarthy in exchange for McCarthy getting the gavel. Appropriations must be passed through the normal process which means 12 appropriations bills produced by the 12 committees through the normal process and are brought to the floor before the statutory deadline which means no more omnibus bills and no more continuing resolutions. And there were many other smaller concessions. McCarthy broke his promises and used Democrats to do it. The small group revolted and that was the end of McCarthy's speakership.

This presents a big problem for many of the GOP blob who no one has ever heard of; McCarthy brought in A LOT of money and he used control of that money to fund many GOP people to win their seats which they otherwise never would have won. These people are duds, they can't fundraise, and their voters do not particularly like them. Without McCarthy protecting their seats and attacking their primary opponents, their seats are toast. This is A LOT of the caucus. These people are very upset that the smaller group of GOP rocked the boat because they have been living large with McCarthy doing all the work and getting the flack to deliver to donors who keep the gravy-train rolling. Many in the caucus feel ousting McCarthy was a stab in the back of leadership who had worked for decades raising billions and taking flak to do things the vast majority of them wanted anyway.

Some other conflicts which exacerbate the issue is the large and growing divide between the GOP and their voters as well as MAGA vs Establishment GOP; the harder and harder to hide secret of the caucus is that a large portion, maybe even a majority, and definitely party leadership actually really dislike their own voters and MAGA is making it increasingly difficult to maintain the scam of lying to their voters while delivering to their donors which keeps the moneytrain, status, etc., rolling in.

tl;dr: a small group of reps attempting to use their negotiating power given a slim minority to bring down two fundamental pillars for how the House works and has for decades which slammed directly into a large group of their own caucus who rely on the scheming and fundraising to maintain their seats and owe those seats to leadership they feel was backstabbed

The small group of GOP representatives were able to get concessions which should end the Dictator Speaker Era as well as the Omnibus/Continuing Resolution Era from McCarthy in exchange for McCarthy getting the gavel. Appropriations must be passed through the normal process which means 12 appropriations bills produced by the 12 committees through the normal process and are brought to the floor before the statutory deadline which means no more omnibus bills and no more continuing resolutions. And there were many other smaller concessions. McCarthy broke his promises and used Democrats to do it. The small group revolted and that was the end of McCarthy's speakership.

It's important to note that this small group was intentionally making it impossible for McCarthy to keep his promise. He was going forward with regular order, the Appropriations committee and relevant subcommittees had reported their bills already by mid-July, but Freedom Caucus holdouts spiked rules votes to begin floor debate on those bills time and time again.

The whole situation was engineered by a group that got to get their names in the headlines off of it. They wanted him to break his promises because then they got to fundraise off of being the scrappy freedom fighters against the duplicitous Establishment. But, by forcing a delay, they put McCarthy in a situation where he had to choose between a shutdown and a CR.

Just like the Left, the Recalcitrants in Congress depend on people being underinformed about how a complex process works so they gin up a self serving narrative.

All twelve bills could have been passed by early August and a unified Republican Conference could have fought a very public and very righteous fiscally conservative battle against Democrats in the Senate and White House through the end of September, boosting their credibility as a serious party of responsible government without risking a shutdown. Instead, they're embarrassing the party and all but guaranteeing the Democrats regain the House next year, all so Matt Gaetz can send out fundraising emails while he votes to kick his own party out of power.

It seems like you’re underrating the possibility that they wanted a shutdown.

Well, what I'm really doing is underrating the diversity of opinion among the Recalcitrants. Chip Roy, although not one of the defenestrators, has consistently been among the recalcitrants on advancing budget bills, but I trust him to be doing what he does for the reasons he says and he would probably have been fine with a shutdown if the budget didn't come out the way he wanted. Gaetz was doing it for attention and fundraising, he thinks he's going to become the next Governor of Florida off of this. Some of the others wanted a shutdown because they seem to think hardball negotiating will get them what they want ( I think Andy Biggs is in this category).

Others may have their own reasons.

Chip Roy is rooting for a shutdown because he wants Greg Abbott to be in charge of US border policy, and right now the most plausible route to that scenario is for the federal government to stop paying the border patrol(with most plausible route #2 being that the Biden admin gives in to all of his demands as a condition of keeping the government open). I think Andy Biggs is in agreement with that policy even if he has a few other demands. Matt Gaetz might be attention whoring, but he might also just be the face of a Biggs/Roy axis who can take a fall if it all blows up.

Appropriations bills haven't gone through the legislatively designated normal process of how they are supposed to be drafted and modified and on what schedule for decades.

Has it been decades? I seem to remember the process being roughly the normal appropriations process up until 2011 or 2012 (can't quite remember which), when they got rid of earmarks.

As of now, Polymarket implicitly thinks either the deadlock will go on longer than 8 months, or that we'll have a candidate coming completely out of left field (i.e. one that's not currently listed). The total potential profit from buying a no share for all options, assuming none come true, is just 38 cents. Granted, Polymarket is a fairly thinly traded platform, but it's still real money people are betting with so that gives it a good deal of legitimacy in my eyes.

Current frontrunners are, as of 10/20/23:

  • Current temp speaker Patrick McHenry at 10%
  • Steve Scalise at 7%
  • Kevin McCarthy back from the dead at 6.5%
  • Tom Emmer at 5.5%
  • Jim Jordan at 5%
  • Hakeem Jeffries at 2%
  • Donald Trump at 1.5%

So there's around a 60% probability that the eventual winner isn't in that list, or that the deadlock lasts longer than the market resolution date of June 30, 2024.

Modern US federal politics is notorious for its gridlock, but this is taking it to a new level.

Modern US federal politics is notorious for its gridlock, but this is taking it to a new level.

I must confess that I'm kind of enjoying it.

You shouldn't. Stasis is ignorable for now, but it has huge costs across society that we'll have to pay one way or the other, either through direct payments for debt or future wars, or indirectly from stifled development.

The first thing mentioned in that article is that housing isn't being built because the government is actively getting in its way. Sure, a government deadlock will, sadly, not stop the regulators, but it'll (at least temporarily) stop lawmakers from tossing even more monkey wrenches into an already-completely-dysfunctional system. Also, "new rail systems won't get built" just sounds like the status quo to me...

I mean, I still vividly recall that during the long Obama government shutdown the only way they could actually get us hoi polloi to feel any pain was to actively shut down public parks (requiring more effort than doing nothing). When you're doing a performance review, and the answer to "so what do you do, exactly?" is "as long as you pay me I won't set fire to the building", it's time for that employee to go.

he first thing mentioned in that article is that housing isn't being built because the government is actively getting in its way.

Correct, and when governments are broken the old regulations stay in place. YIMBYs are constantly stymied by all the veto points present in American politics.

but it'll (at least temporarily) stop lawmakers from tossing even more monkey wrenches into an already-completely-dysfunctional system.

Surely you must think at least some regulations are good, like "don't put poisonous substances in the drinking water". Other regulations can obviously be abused by rent-seekers, while others still can be bad if they were just poorly thought out. The solution to the latter two is to... just make better regulations. This is hard and it won't always go in the right direction, but it's pretty dang important for a functional society.

The "regulations are always net-negative" idea is a goofy right-libertarian version of Whig history that will have us drinking the equivalent of cyanide-laced water for some future problem. Sure, it might look like there's nothing critically important to regulate right now, but society and technology move on, and it's not very helpful if the machinery of state is completely paralyzed by people endlessly throwing sand in the gears because they thought regulations were impossible to ever do correctly.

Sorry, it sounds like you want some easy slam-dunk argument against some sort of cartoonish capital-L Libertarian, but that's not who you're speaking to. :) I don't want NO government and NO regulations - of course some regulations are good. But that says nothing about whether we have TOO MUCH government and TOO MUCH regulation right now. Most of the important obviously good stuff has been in the system for decades (if not centuries), because it's, well, important. And even if we kicked legislators out for 51 weeks out of every 52, the important stuff would still pass because it's, well, important. I happen to believe that most of what our modern legislators do IS net-negative, and I'm afraid you can't just hand-wave that away with a strawman argument.

As for YIMBYs, bless your heart Charlie Brown, you keep trying to kick that football. Surely one day they'll win! You yourself linked an article about the dire straits we're in. "Don't try to stop or slow down the government, we need it to fix all the problems caused by the last 50 years of government!"

If you think all regulations can be monolithically grouped into a giant "is bad" category then there's probably no convincing you no matter what I say. If the difference between "bad regulations" and "good regulations" don't matter since you think legislators will almost always do the wrong thing, then yeah, no point in trying I guess.

:)

bless your heart Charlie Brown

Comments like these are pretentious and unnecessary.

I happen to believe that most of what our modern legislators do IS net-negative

If you think all regulations can be monolithically grouped into a giant "is bad" category...

If the difference between "bad regulations" and "good regulations" don't matter...

I have no idea how you're extracting these arguments from what I said. (shrug)

Comments like these are pretentious and unnecessary.

For the record, I wasn't trying to be mean-spirited (just "funny"), but I see it could come off that way.

I mean, I still vividly recall that during the long Obama government shutdown the only way they could actually get us hoi polloi to feel any pain was to actively shut down public parks

That's because there are a bunch of practices in place to minimize the impact of government shutdowns as long as they don't run too long. They could've ended the practice of requiring critical Federal employees to work without pay, leading to shutting down airports, not sending SSI checks, a ton of law enforcement activity being suspended (send CBP home), etc... If you're middle class and/or old you're insulated from most of the negative short term impacts by design.

Cool, cool. So, the obvious follow-up question is, can we just keep those critical federal employees, and drop everyone else? We might even survive firing the seven critical workers who were kept off furlough to keep people away from the Washington Monument.

I'm being a little facetious. You have a point, of course - lots of government services seem extraneous right up until the point where you (or someone else in a worse situation) desperately need them. It would be great if there was an option somewhere between 0% and 100% of our current government, where the first 10% to go isn't the part calculated to maximize spite.

A government shutdown that lasts more than a month or so would result in the border patrol being offered employment by the Texas state government en masse, albeit probably with very different policies.

I mean, honestly, being a young enough person to not expect social security anyways who lives in a region that would almost inevitably be the imperial core for at least some portion of the continental US if the federal government collapses under its own incompetence and infighting, just shutting it down and not worrying if it reopens seems fine I guess.

The government not doing things is not the same as nothing getting done.

There's some parts of the US that are doing well, like computers and renewables, but a lot of other places have devolved to an ossified gerontocracy. And a broken government, really, really doesn't help.

Disagree on that one. That the Academic/Managerial class has devolved into an ossified gerontocracy, is exactly why a broken government is a good thing.

The less opportunity or ability they have to interfere with the people actually producing things the better.

Don't underestimate the ability of a broken government to get in the way though. The government offices being empty doesn't mean buildings get built without approval, it merely means that nothing can be approved at all, so nothing will be built. The enforcement wing is sadly usually the last to break, so it can continue preventing action long after it has lost the capability to allow it.

The enforcement wing is sadly usually the last to break, so it can continue preventing action long after it has lost the capability to allow it.

We're talking about the feds here. The vast majority of things don't need federal approval. The state governments can approve things.

More comments

Honestly, to some extent it feels like it matches the overall sentiment of the electorate with respect to where they want the country to go: a minority of really strong opinions, but definitely no consensus and a whole lot of normies quite content to grill and shrug.

And despite the US method of forming coalitions differing from a parliamentary system, this isn't unheard of in Europe either: Belgium was without a coalition government for the better part of two years during the Obama administration.

Belgium doesn’t have government shutdowns, though, does it?

What I'm hearing is the plan now is to do marathon votes, potentially through the weekend, as a strategy to wear down the holdouts and elect Jordan.

This is so weird. If someone sincerely thinks Jordan shouldn't be the Speaker, why would it matter how many times they vote? What's the incentive to just sit there, roll your eyes, and vote for not-Jordan?

There are 10 Democratic member of the house who are over 80, if you run votes for 18 hours you stand a reasonable chance of pushing the session long enough that some of them decide bed sounds better than voting when they know they have essentially no chance of their guy winning.

'Fillibuster to the death' emerges as a viable strategy at some point...

I mean, not for nothing, but as I understand it these are mostly quite old office-dwelling people who have to be physically present and sitting upright and not asleep when each of these votes happen.

The strategy may be to literally wear them out, physically, mentally, and emotionally, until their strength fails or their will breaks and they either give in or go home.

The strategy is opaque to me as well. I'm under the impression attrition is how McCarthy got the last few holdouts to vote "Present" rather than for someone else, which secured him the Speakership. However there was a lot of discussion and compromise to actually get the votes over Jeffries. My impression is Jordan hasn't been doing this part (maybe he can't?) which means getting people to vote "Present" by attrition is not going to work.

More bad press for them, the base is riled up and wants them out, elections are coming up, etc.

It remains wild to me how few Representatives cleave to the perspective that they should simply vote in the fashion that they think is correct and then win or lose elections on the merit of that. I suppose I understand that the selection filter for who winds up there doesn't favor such a personality, but you'd still think there would be a few.

Or more likely it's just a convenient stance to take when there are big donors like the MIC putting bags of money on the scales behind the scenes.

The end goal of white nationalists, as opposed to white nationalism, is to jerk themselves off to a vanilla variation on we wuz kangz to make up for their otherwise sad lives, until they die alone in a dilapidated old farmhouse somewhere.

White nationalist influencers compete to be the most extreme, offering up ever hotter takes and ever fewer deliverables. Trapped in the iron law of institutions, their status within extremely online white nationalism is worth more than the status of white nationalism, or of the white race more generally.

White nationalist followers, they follow for the same reason devotees of any conspiracy theory (most extreme political beliefs are indistinguishable from conspiracy theories) follow, to make up for the sadness in their own lives. The vast majority are failures in one way or another, socially or financially or romantically or professionally, who find in grand racial narratives a reason why their lives are so hard when other people's lives seem so easy. Blame it on the Jews and the niggers and suddenly everything seems so much simpler, there's no blame left for the white nationalist himself.

Just like the Communist imagines that his own life will be so much better once the eschaton is immanent, or the Palestinians imagine that life will be so much better if they just owned that other patch of desert instead of the one they are on, the white nationalist imagines that life will be peaches and cream when they are around people whose complexion is all peaches and cream. They haven't just tried Vermont, "the leaves change colors but the people never do," because they'd still be losers there.

Bio-Leninism doesn't stop when you get to the right of Lenin politically.

There is no realistic universe in which white nationalism succeeds. First, after all, white people would need a cohesive definition of whiteness. White nationalism lacks even a unified understanding of who and what they are fighting for. The census data cited elsewhere in this roundup includes most Hispanics, Aryanism includes Persians but not Arabs, Turanism includes the Turks but not the Chinese, what sense does it make to include Sicilians but exclude spaniards if they lived in Caracas too long, my learned friend in argument Hoff seems to include the damn Japanese. The imagined community is simply too imaginary for anything beyond masturbatory scheming.

On white nationalism, see @HlynkaCG below.

Are you sure you aren’t painting your ideological enemies as objectively immoral losers predestined to have bad lives — and who do not have sex — because these emotionally repulsive characteristics overpower the logical mind? Meaning you no longer need to do the dirty work of considering their line of reasoning or rebuffing their values?

I think people who share socially excommunicable things online have crossed a selection effect filter, and as such are not representative of the median case. Consider porn: despite the fact that 90% of young men watch porn, only the most deranged person online will like and share X-rated posts under their real name. The online presence of these people do not tell you the median life of a porn-viewer, which is decidedly median. This applies to a whole array of things. The people who pine for a white-only nation are either going to post anonymously somewhere, not post at all, or have given up on a normal social life and no longer care about anonymity.

But there are some ways to decipher what these people are like. The “leaders” of the movement who de-anonymize themselves range from run-of-the-mill (Jason Kessler) to the most accomplished you can be as a liberal arts student (Richard Spencer and Costin Alamariu). When Tucker Carlson’s writer Blake Neff was doxxed, and mind you he may have had the most influential job of any conservative writer in America, we learned that he would post racist trolls anonymously in his free time (“Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down”, this ridiculous kind of stuff).

It's important to distinguish here between racism and white nationalism. The former is a proposition one can believe personally and it is or isn't true, whatever. Run your life according to it, you will benefit if it is true, regardless of what anyone else believes.

The latter requires recruiting a supermajority of white people to your cause, a cause obviously doomed once one observes the beliefs of most wealthy successful young whites. It only works as a magical thinking conspiracy theory, as a belief in the Emperor Nero escaped to the East and returning with a great army. It benefits you zero unless everyone believes in it too.

@Folamh3 summarized it well here.

But in general I like @ThenElection 's point here

The most socially attuned straight white men treat wokeness as a man in the 1950s would treat Christianity. Mouth the platitudes, make sure to turn up to the expected group ceremonies, avoid socializing with people who loudly reject it, and certainly don't angrily denounce it yourself. But never go too far in that direction: someone performing a public display of self-flagellation will always be considered a weirdo, no matter how motivated it is by his dedication to righteousness.

The idea of a silent hidden unfalsifiable majority that believes in what you believe strikes me as rather too self serving to be real.

The vast majority are failures in one way or another, socially or financially or romantically or professionally, who find in grand racial narratives a reason why their lives are so hard when other people's lives seem so easy.

I've heard this said a lot, and reinforced in pop culture. But do you have any evidence this is actually the case?

This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely asking - obviously almost every white nationalist (whose job isn't to advance the WN agenda) is only going to express their views anonymously, so I don't see how to know whether they're writing from their mother's basement, or to get their thoughts out after a productive day's work at a high-paying white collar job before having dinner with their wife and 2 kids.

Blame it on the Jews and the niggers and suddenly everything seems so much simpler, there's no blame left for the white nationalist himself.

From what I've read on unz and vdare, there is a bit of hypo-agency in the comments section, and moreover the tone is often just nasty and childish.

But as for (most of) the actual columnists, like Gregory Hood, Jared Taylor, etc - I think this criticism is unfair. I think they honestly believe in good-faith that Jews (actually some of them seem to be in favour of Jews) and Blacks (and various other non-White races), on average, make the life of white people worse in some tangible fashion (the latter due to lower IQs, higher crime rates, etc and the former for encouraging anti-White sentiments)

They haven't just tried Vermont, "the leaves change colors but the people never do," because they'd still be losers there.

Even non-WN Whites engage in White Flight, so I assume actual WNs do so as well. And I assume that a WN would want to take active measures to maintain/increase the white share of the population of Vermont.

There is no realistic universe in which white nationalism succeeds.

If by success you mean White people somehow break off all ties with all of their non-White friends/family and get rid of the non-White population (by mass deportation, genocide, paid emigration or otherwise) and create a 21st century Nazi Germany, then yes - there is no chance of that happening.

But success is a spectrum - it is entirely plausible and realistic to try and stop all illegal immigration, severely limit legal immigration, and make anti-White racism become less acceptable than it is currently. These would all bring the current reality closer to the desired reality of the WN.

First, after all, white people would need a cohesive definition of whiteness.

Yes, you can reasonably disagree over whether various edge cases like Jews, mixed race people with > 75% white ancestry, Eastern Europeans, etc should be included in "White" - but there's clearly a spectrum, and most people who potentially fall under "Whiteness" would just be unambiguously White in any reasonable definition.

By the same logic, all attempts to advance Black ethnic interests in the US (which have been met with resounding success) should have failed miserably - after all what does it even mean to be Black? Everyone seems to agree that Mulattos should count as Black, but what about people with just a single black grandparent like Megan Markle (she looks pretty White to me)?

my learned friend in argument Hoff seems to include the damn Japanese.

If I understand @Hoffmeister25's view of race relations correctly - he believes that the only important distinction is between those with non-trace amounts (>20%?) of Sub-Saharan African/Aboriginal ancestry and those without, and he accordingly defines "White" to be the latter category (which leads to the inclusion of Japanese people)

I think this does sound a bit silly at first - but I think it makes more sense than defining Whiteness as belonging to some subset of European races. Any serious argument for White Nationalism that isn't just petty aestheticism* is based on the fact that Whiteness is a correlator for various traits that are desirable in an advanced civilisation (and also believing these traits are largely genetic, and so are immune to any kind of social/cultural intervention), and so whether or not a race is "White" should be decided based upon the character of that race and their contributions to science and human culture, as opposed to something so trivial as the colour of their skin.

*Well there's also the argument that Whites should preserve the White race simply because it is natural and human to care about those you're genetically related to (and similarly so should all other races) - but I think this is just a bit silly. Yes - your race is just a weaker version of your an extended family, but unlike the HBD argument, this one has much less of a tangible benefit (It can feel a bit alienating being the only person of race X amongst your friends/institution, especially in childhood - but I'd take 100x that emotional pain over the physical pain of being shot or stabbed)

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/smart-people-racism-equality-prejudice/

Adult Racism is negatively correlated with childhood IQ, and with verbal test ability.

Survey respondents with better scores on the verbal ability test were much less likely to have a negative view of black people’s intelligence and work ethic. For example, 45.7 percent of respondents who scored the lowest on the test reported that they think “blacks are lazy.” About one-quarter (28.8 percent) of the highest scorers agreed with the statement.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34922337/

Racist attitudes positively correlated with risk of cardiovascular disease.

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/36645656/AJPS1-libre.pdf?1424109585=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DReexamining_Racial_Attitudes_The_Conditi.pdf&Expires=1697999510&Signature=YAh4tFTCOdz3sOFY-J34tMOQetDgao2Wp3X-qPOa7e6lCQ8Qb1LoIyx8O9tP7D7-VfIKxgiRb2jy6ElZpsesPWgkiL0NWyJjZEcU6lcuigOArY3J6VE76ed2NV6kHnPpGVmOL50nlcQMalMzdxg2TqeN0LQYRaDOACGKOgXb9dWKvuY3HPy0lLbMRkof1ufaMEGQ7IpFtRKD7qgpRVzxkqIcLssiQGkT0zsLiLfoqstb2DOF24bwae5K1Aj5CKbVCHfV2oWYyC3R7zWH5uBa4l4zy1fk9RRsD6gwvS~8n64a67nWVd0V36IFhXHI7qh-KFL4g3JcxhiiZB881pnw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

High socioeconomic status groups respond to diversity by becoming less racist, low socioeconomic status groups respond to diversity by becoming more racist.

A large body of empirical evidence supports this view, showing that highly educated Whites are more likely to reject negative racial stereotypes, agree with structural explanations for Black-White inequality, and endorse principles of equal treatment (Schuman et al. 1997).

Additional studies show that racism correlates positively with things like going to prison, and that racist attitudes correlated negatively with things like owning a home.

Now one can quibble with all that. Maybe all those things are just measuring college education, and liberal indoctrination on racial issues are just dogma. Intelligence probably correlated with believing in transubstantiation in Catholic Europe and in disbelief in transubstantiation in Protestant Europe, education tells you that societal truths are real. Or one can argue that people lie on surveys. Or that the actual number of true white nationalists is so small that they can hide in the margins of studies like this, though the latter is damning with faint praise.

But this invisible unfalsifiable mass of powerful racists is an imaginary friend/nemesis shared, as @HlynkaCG likes to point out, between woke and wignat thinkers. Look around elite corporations and college campuses, no open racists, but they're all secretly the real racists! It's leftist thinking, it would violate the progressive stack.

Then you look at the visible leaders in the field. You have Richard Spencer, who at last check lived with his mother. You have EOW Kierkegaard, who changed his name and fled the country to escape a $10,000 judgment against him (a judgment for court costs resulting from his own failed attempt at lawfare, a frivolous lawsuit to shut up a critic). No successful first worlder is more than mildly inconvenienced by a $10,000 cost. I'll spot you one of Hanania or Moldbug, though both would deny being in that scene they're close enough to count for half each and they seem to be living well.

RE white vs black need for clear definitions

The difference being that Blacks were a small minority, and sought notional equality. There was no universe where they had an interest in excluding anyone from negritude, and no one so excluded would suffer should they achieve their aims. Where white nationalists seek exclusion. If I join up with the wignat project today, I'm hoping things play out that my wife is considered white by the faction that wins. I'm just trusting in that, as the protection of my family. That's a bad gamble. Because once we live in Wignat land, my half breed kids won't have other minorites to support them because those groups have been thrown out.

The attempt to reframe wignat ideology as purely an anti Black (and maybe Arab?) Coalition assumes that it is all people care about. That makes little sense. Cultural closeness is going to mean more than iq to most people.

Aesthetics are part of it, but things like religion are also important. Things like cuisine, like customs. Evangelical whites are closer to American Blacks than they are to Asian immigrants on all those; without evangelical whites a right wing movement is a joke. I took communion this morning at mass from an African priest; to become a wignat I must reject the Church. That's a big ask.

A white nationalism that rejects Christianity is rejecting the real cultural glue of American and European history.

High socioeconomic status groups respond to diversity by becoming less racist, low socioeconomic status groups respond to diversity by becoming more racist.

crude model: it could be explained that his SES, their NAM peers have criminality 0.5% versus their own 0.05% but for low-SES, NAM peers have 5% criminality versus their own 0.5%, even if the difference is ten-fold is each case, the high SES have less to worry about.

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/smart-people-racism-equality-prejudice/

Adult Racism is negatively correlated with childhood IQ, and with verbal test ability.

Thanks for the evidence. As @The_Nybbler has pointed out, you could argue this away by theorising that the smarter racists merely have the common sense not to express overtly racist views in public contexts.

But I think this leads to the question of what it really means to "believe" something - if a man goes through his whole life saying that he believes in God, goes to church each week and baptises all his children, I think he probably ends up "believing" in God in some sense to smooth over the cognitive dissonance.

Now one can quibble with all that. Maybe all those things are just measuring college education, and liberal indoctrination on racial issues are just dogma. Intelligence probably correlated with believing in transubstantiation in Catholic Europe and in disbelief in transubstantiation in Protestant Europe, education tells you that societal truths are real. Or one can argue that people lie on surveys.

Well yes - that's my take on the matter. But that's just an explanation of why WNs are less successful on average (that isn't "you'd have to be an idiot to think something so stupid") - I think a college education is a very good correlator for intelligence.

The difference being that Blacks were a small minority, and sought notional equality. There was no universe where they had an interest in excluding anyone from negritude, and no one so excluded would suffer should they achieve their aims.

Yes - that is a good point. However I was trying to demonstrate that your general principle of any kind of movement to advance the interests of group X requires us to have a precise, legalistic definition of what it means to be X (Black Activists and White nationalists are similar in the lack of one)

If I join up with the wignat project today, I'm hoping things play out that my wife is considered white by the faction that wins. I'm just trusting in that, as the protection of my family. That's a bad gamble. Because once we live in Wignat land, my half breed kids won't have other minorites to support them because those groups have been thrown out.

Firstly - White Nationalism is obviously marketed primarily towards Whites who marry other Whites. It's not an indictment of the movement that you would be opposed to it, anymore than the fact most non-White people would be opposed as well - it's not meant for you!

But also to address your point - as you said it is a gamble, but you seem to ignore the possibility of it turning out well for your offspring - if they are included as "White", then they end up living in a state with a much lower crime rate, less money spent on welfare, etc (This isn't to say it couldn't still wind up as negative expected utility, just that it's not uniformly negative over all possible outcomes)

The attempt to reframe wignat ideology as purely an anti Black (and maybe Arab?) Coalition assumes that it is all people care about. That makes little sense. Cultural closeness is going to mean more than iq to most people.

I agree that most people don't judge others on IQ - but we're not talking about normal people. We're talking about a group that exists on the fringe of the fringes.

However I don't think cultural closeness will be the deciding factor either. I think what will actually inflame passions is violent Black crime.

If you're happy with the current state of affairs (as you and I both are), then any kind of argument about how the IQ/culture/etc of group X doesn't really inspire you to action, it's all so abstract, the harm is all in expected value. And anyway, talking about this sort of stuff could land you in trouble, and even just thinking about it could alienate you from your friends/family ("what are you thinking about?" "...um, nothing") - why not focus on another engaging line of inquiry with less self-destructive potential?

On the other hand, victims of violent crime experience extreme, angry and fearful emotions. And when someone sees a video of the crime (as far right accounts love sharing on Twitter) they instinctually feel some of that fear and anger - and I think that if more and more people start getting exposed to this sort of content, this may very well make them seriously question notions of racial equality (and then maybe even become WNs)

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/smart-people-racism-equality-prejudice/

Adult Racism is negatively correlated with childhood IQ, and with verbal test ability.

The URL alone casts doubt on that. The study seems pretty badly confounded... the higher IQ you are, the more likely you are to know that expressing racist views is taboo. The study's abstract actually has a third proposal (which is the one the authors accepted):

It is commonly hypothesized that higher cognitive abilities promote racial tolerance and a greater commitment to racial equality, but an alternative theoretical framework contends that higher cognitive abilities merely enable members of a dominant racial group to articulate a more refined legitimizing ideology for racial inequality.

That is, the smarter you are the more sneaky a racist you are.

Like I said about conservatism, it's not constructive to try and identify a goal for white nationalism. Ultimately, these guys are moving according to particular values and drives and according to a particular theory of the world, not to try and reach a particular destination.

Shutting down legal immigration entirely? Fair enough, but most Western countries have already been so "demographically transformed" such that a white ethnostate is impossible to achieve through immigration reform alone.

As the saying goes, when in a hole, quit digging.

Most people nowadays have a non-white friend, family member, partner, or work colleague. White nationalism would mean severing these important relationships. In sum, white nationalism is dead on arrival as a political movement.

Many people nowadays are willing to sever important relationships in the name of politics. Divisiveness might be a obstacle, but I don't think it's what kills the movement. If cutting off a friend over race seems ridiculous but pronoun use does not, that simply seems to be because we've absorbed liberal norms around colour-blindness.

What is the end goal of white nationalism?

To see our founding principles utterly discredited and destroyed so that they might be replaced with a load of post-modern psuedo-marxist intersectional nonsense.

If you want to understand "white nationalism" as it exists on twitter and various rat-adjacent spaces, you need to understand that they are motivated by the same thing the intersectional left is. Specifically, certain sense of entitlement/having been chosen coupled with belief in the ideology of victimhood that ultimately manifests as a deep and abiding resentment of what the West in general, and the Anglosphere/US in particular has historically represented. The idea that all men are created equal is simply intolerable to them because it means they have to actually work at being better if they want to be perceived as being better.

Idiots like Steve Sailor and Greg Johnson can bitch about dysgenics all they want but at the end of the day the middle-class white guy who marries a thicc Latina and pumps out a couple of kids is doing more to actually implement and embody the 14 words (not to mention build a nation) than the vast majority of so-called "white nationalists" are.

a deep and abiding resentment of what the West in general, and the Anglosphere/US in particular has historically represented.

Whatever you imagine “the West” to be, it seems to bear no resemblance to the actual historical reality, in which every important European country practiced widespread, industrialized chattel slavery, as well as explicitly racial conquest of non-white peoples. The men of the West believed for centuries that white people were naturally and manifestly supreme over lesser races, whose backward practices and pathetic excuses for culture needed to be flattened and replaced with the ways of “Christendom” - understood in explicitly racial terms at the time - as part of the destiny of Western man.

You decry “progressives”, yet you clearly believe in a very strong form of historical progress yourself. You want to pretend to cherish “the West” as a coherent and contiguous historical/cultural whole, but you clearly believe that the specific part of Western history when Enlightenment principles emerged - sweeping away bedrock principles and practices which had defined massive swathes of European and Semitic history - should be treated preferentially as a wholesale improvement and indeed irreversible replacement of what had come previously.

Aristotle certainly didn’t believe that “all men are created equal”; he wrote reams of material arguing precisely the opposite. Nor did any of the men who wrote the Old Testament, and nor did most of the men who founded the United States. If you want to believe that ideological principles which are less than 300 years old represent the only important legacy of the multiple millennia of European and Semitic thought, be my guest; it’s an entirely respectable and coherent position. But then you can’t really claim any appreciation for “the West”.

And of course all of this leaves aside the fact that you have still never once engaged with the core claim at the heart of white nationalist ideology, which is that distinct peoples - and I mean distinct in terms of language, culture, religion, heritable proclivities, shared history, or whatever other organizing principle you want to pick - function best as a homogeneous polity, free to pursue its own path and tend to its own affairs. It’s the principle that led to the formation of most of the modern states existing in the world today. Slovaks will have the best and happiest life if they can just worry about being Slovenes and taking care of the welfare of other Slovaks, while Czechs meanwhile can focus on being the best Czechs that they can be.

White nationalists simply apply the same principles to distinct racial-cultural groups within their own countries. Some white nationalists want a unified multinational, multilingual confederation of European-descended peoples; other white nationalists viciously disagree, and believe that all of the different white peoples of the world - from the Dutch to the Poles to even currently stateless ethnic groups like the Basques - should have their own distinct states. The only through-line linking these two diametrically-opposed stances is the belief that there are sufficient aggregate differences in temperament and shared history between, on the one hand, people of European descent, and on the other hand, people of non-European descent, such that the optimal model of political organization is one in which each lives apart from the other, and neither is politically responsible for the welfare of the other.

I don’t know where you see “victimhood” in any of this. If you’re talking specifically about the pathological whining about how hapless and blameless whites are being manipulated and coerced by ultra-powerful Jews into ruining their own countries and failing to maintain the former glory of their ancestral patrimony, then I agree with you that this is a flawed and pathetic attitude. This is not, however, an integral aspect of white nationalism. Many more clear-eyed and practical figures within the movement are far more focused on identifying and combating the unique shortcomings and failure modes of their own people - in the same way that any nationalist of any healthy civilization ought to do - than they are with blaming some other people for those failures.

It may surprise you to hear that I basically agree with you! I want to clarify that I myself don’t answer to the term “white nationalist”, and part of the reason is basically what you’re pointing at. If white nationalism means total opposition to all marriages between any person of European heritage and any person of non-European heritage, then I fully agree with you that such a project would be DOA in America. It would have been successful - it was successful - even a hundred years ago. But, after sixty years of mass non-European immigration, the demographic horse has already left the barn. Marriage between many white people and many non-white people is an irreversible reality in this country as of the 21st century. Marriages between whites and Hispanics are not going to stop. Marriages between whites and Asians are not going to stop. To the extent that white nationalism as a movement cannot figure out a way to work within the constraints of this reality, I agree that it will not be sustainable outside of Europeans countries that are still 80+% white.

However, you yourself have now linked multiple posts of mine which were brought to your attention by @HelmedHorror. (Thank you to him for plugging my work while I was completely occupied by my day job this week.) In those very posts, I explicate my somewhat idiosyncratic and very broad framework for what I mean when I say “white”. In those posts, and in other of mine in this forum, I’ve said that Asians are welcome within the big tent of whiteness. I also see the necessity of integrating mestizo Hispanics into this tent, which will be a complicated but not insurmountable project. Much as modern-day Europeans have genetic ancestry from three distinct populations - Western Hunter-Gatherers, Neolithic Farmers, and Proto-Indo-Europeans - I think it’s likely that the globally-dominant human population in 2,000 years will probably have some combination of European, East Asian, and probably Hispanic ancestry.

Remember that the big division that I care about is “black vs. non-black”. It really is just people with substantial sub-Saharan and Negrito (Australian/Oceanian Aboriginal) ancestry that I think the rest of the world’s populations need to remain separate from. (Arabs represent another major sticking point, and I’m still figuring out exactly what I think the optimal outcome would look like regarding that population and how/whether it could successfully integrate with other populations.) Now, certainly there are people right now with at least partial black ancestry who I could definitely imagine a successful white-centric culture managing to successfully embrace and integrate. (Is Blake Griffin “white”? Is Aaron Gordon? Is Mariah Carey? Sure! If they truly want to be!) This would require those people to relinquish any cultural/emotional/political affiliation to blackness as an identity and to marry and reproduce with people with zero black ancestry, in order to dilute the percentage of black ancestry in the future population to as small a number as possible.

Since the vast majority of blacks will not do this - and to be clear, that’s not an indictment of them, but rather a simple acknowledgment that for the vast majority of people, identity is centrally important and it is completely natural and healthy to relate to, and to value the welfare of, people who physically and ancestrally resemble you - and since only a small percentage of blacks are truly capable of integrating successfully into first-world civilization, it is going to be necessary to exclude them. Right now, in this country, people of mulatto (half-black, half-white) ancestry overwhelmingly relate more to their black ancestry and seek to be accepted by black culture. One can propose paths forward to a future in which the reverse is true, and I’m open to hearing them, but my money is on this continuing to be the case for a very, very long time.

Now, regarding AmRen’s claim that Chris Rufo’s marriage to a Thai woman makes it basically impossible to trust him as a reliable ally to this movement given current political and philosophical realities, is simply a descriptive observation, rather than the prescriptive/normative claim that you’re interpreting it to be. I think it’s a demonstrable fact that most people who are in mixed-race relationships are going to be extremely turned-off by any movement which they perceive as remotely threatening to those relationships. Whether their perceptions are accurate or not is not ultimately all that relevant. For example, a friend of mine from high school - historically a pretty conservative/libertarianish guy, skeptical of the left - was posting on Facebook a few years ago about his support for BLM, his opposition to any “racist” or “nativist” or “anti-black” political forces, etc. This guy is white, but married to a (very light-skinned, evidently of at least partial white ancestry herself) Filipina friend of ours, with whom he has two children. He told me that as a father of mixed-race children, it’s crucial for him to support pro-black causes in order to oppose “systemic racism” that threatens his family. This argument involves total non sequiturs, as far as I’m concerned; what does supporting a black communist organization that seeks to appropriate non-blacks’ resources in order to enrich blacks and prevent black criminals from being punished have to do with the safety of hapa children? But for a great many people in mixed-race relationships, they apparently currently perceive the only two choices as “white nationalism” (scary, bad, unacceptable) or “total unwavering loyalty to a coalition of non-white identity groups who oppose any attempt by whites to exert political will on their own behalf”. Cutting this Gordian knot of branding and public perception is the key struggle of white nationalist/identitarian movements, and in America at least they are fighting an uphill battle.

That’s one of the reasons why, for me, it’s so important to draw clear distinctions and explicitly communicate that we don’t have any big problem with white guys marrying Asian women, or even “thicc Latinas”. It’s not our ideal world, but the ideal world is no longer attainable given current (and seemingly irreversible) demographic trends. We need to work with what we’ve got, which is why some form of Castizo Futurism needs to be the way forward in America, while still fighting hard to preserve overwhelming white demographic dominance in any and all European countries in which that’s still even a remotely achievable possibility.

In those very posts, I explicate my somewhat idiosyncratic and very broad framework for what I mean when I say “white”.

This was a lot of words to explain that what you mean by "white" is basically "not black." This is why I find your views - articulate and verbose as they are - to be incoherent and not entirely ingenuous. You have some very personal grievances based on your, ah, "lived experiences," and basically you don't want to live around black people, but just saying it like that doesn't sound very nice even to other rightists, so you've invented this vision of "white nationalism" which includes Asians and Hispanics and Jews and basically anyone who isn't too dark and black-ish.

It's like claiming you are Christian or "Christian-adjacent" but really, you just like the vibes, so everyone should join your Christianity but believing in God is not a requirement, and all that talk about Jesus is kind of cringe, and why can't we include Jews and Zoroastrians under the Christian umbrella?

You have some very personal grievances based on your, ah, "lived experiences," and basically you don't want to live around black people, but just saying it like that doesn't sound very nice even to other rightists

Call it uh, Scott Adams-nationalism.

“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people,” the 65-year-old author exclaimed. “Just get the (expletive) away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”

In another comment I explain why I don’t call myself a “white nationalist”, and it’s mostly exactly what you’re pointing to. It would be disingenuous of me to present myself as a white nationalist, with all of the assumptions and associations that come with that brand, but then privately believe in some other ideology so far removed from the central example of that ideology that the two are totally incompatible.

The term I generally use when I describe my worldview is “white advocate” or “white identitarian”. My whiteness is very important to me; I’m very proud to be a direct descendant of the Anglos, and the Europeans more broadly, who built everything important about the pre-20th-century world. I oppose any efforts to marginalizes whites within the countries whites built, and in which whites are still the majority of the population. I want whiteness to be centered in those countries, and for it to be widely understood that non-white people in those countries are guests and newcomers who must tread lightly and maintain a deep respect for their host societies. And I want the small number of non-European-descended individuals invited into those countries to be integrated not only culturally, but also by blood - marrying native whites, giving their children names which are indistinguishable from those typical of the host population, and hoping their children do the same, such that European ancestry will always predominate in those societies.

In the much longer-term future, I would like to see a mixing of white and Asian peoples, creating a race with combined ancestry from both. While I do have a strong aesthetic attachment to a world in which some not-insignificant number of women look like Blake Lively and Rachel McAdams, in the idea future probably more of them will look more like Mina Kimes, and that will be just fine as well.

The lower classes in America, meanwhile, will continue to interbreed with Latinos. It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not, it’s going to continue to happen. We could build the wall tomorrow in earnest and the Latino population would still be too massive to prevent this outcome. And look, I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life; the appeal of light-skinned Latinas is absolutely not lost on me. My sister is dating a guy who’s half-white, half-Mexican. Really nice guy, we all like him a lot, etc. Based on conversations I’ve had with her, I doubt she’s ever going to have any children, which is heartbreaking to me, but if she does marry him and have kids, they’ll probably look pretty much white, maybe with darker hair than average and the ability to tan, and that won’t be the end of the world. That’s probably what a very large percentage of the American population will look like in 100 years. Again, it’s not my perfect world, but we have to work with the materials we’ve been given and use them to construct the best possible future we can under those conditions.

As for your contention that I am careful not to openly say “I just don’t want to live around blacks” so I construct a whole edifice of fake ideology to avoid looking like a jerk, I think that’s a misrepresentation. Again, my worldview is more complicated than “everyone who isn’t black can just say ‘I’m white!’ and that’s good enough for me.” It’s more complicated than that, and involves a lot of genuine work and assimilation and careful interbreeding. Some dark-skinned Amerindian-looking guy from the jungles of South America can’t just say “I’m white and my whole family who looks like me is white” and that’s the end of the story. There are criteria people need to meet in order to be white, and it’s a multigenerational process.

It’s also not fair to just say “I don’t want to live around blacks.” By and large I don’t want to live around blacks, and I’m pretty explicit about that. But I’ve also said that there are black people in my life who cause me a lot of angst about my ideological commitments, and I spend time agonizing over “well, what if we were able to make an exception for her, because she’d fit right in…” and then I’m struck by how complicated the world is and how ideology is a prison, etc., same as any intelligent and thoughtful person ought to be. My understanding of Mormonism is that they square this circle by saying “If you try really hard to be a good Mormon, you’ll be white in Heaven even if you weren’t in life.” I think that’s charming, and is a more earnest and wholesome version of the RW Twitter memes where people joke about how Clarence Thomas will be invited into Hyperborea.

If more people knew what Castizo Futurism was, I’d probably use that word to describe myself. Unfortunately, that meme has pretty much died on the right. AmRen used to run articles about it, but they abandoned the term a king time ago and I don’t see it used anywhere. Too complicated to sell to normies, maybe? Or perhaps too full of contradictions, too milquetoast, too accommodationist. I’ve thought about trying to bring it back by writing more extensively and with more carefully-considered explications of the ideology, rather than spitballing like I’ve done here. Whatever I do, it’s not going to be disingenuous, although I can’t promise it won’t be incoherent.

This is low effort and not adding much to the conversation.

Since you deleted your other comment, I'm not going to mod you for it (it was wise of you to delete it), but I am still going to tell you that we can see deleted comments, and it does inform the perception we have of how you are interacting with others.

The thing is, I was never all that “far left”. Even at the height of my “college socialist” phase, my opinions were squarely within what would in 2023 be the normie progressive Overton window. Opposing foreign wars and “imperialism”, wanting Wall Street bankers imprisoned, believing in economic redistribution and gay marriage. These were on the “far left” relative to the largely apolitical liberal-ish social scenes in which I had rolled prior to that point, but they would be bog-standard among any self-respecting PMC type today. My ideology now is massively farther outside of the Overton window than anything I believed ten years ago as a leftist.

Have you documented the cause for your swap anywhere?

The founding Fathers were white nationalists. This is nonsensical and extremely online. I hope you are trolling with this take. Segregation ended only 60 years ago.

The founding Fathers were white nationalists.

Worth noting that at least Benjamin Franklin's definition of "White" would have excluded French people, Russians, Swedes, and Bavarians -- quite different from how it would be used today.

Then they shouldn't have imported so many black people. That necessarily precludes ever having a white nation. Also some of them were race mixers and not at all meeting the purity standards of modern white nationalists.

They planned to send all the blacks back to Africa once they were no longer needed. Thomas Jefferson was very explicit about this, as I demonstrated in a reply to Hlynka above. Many of the greatest Americans, from James Madison to Andrew Jackson, and from Daniel Webster to Henry Clay, were members of an organization entirely dedicated to achieving this goal, as, again, I’ve noted in multiple comments in this thread. This effort was a dismal failure, resulting in the deportation of only a few thousand blacks to what became Liberia. So, yes, the importation of a massive population of black slaves was a disaster for this country, and the men responsible should indeed be roundly lambasted for their decision to do so. However, it’s not like it didn’t occur to the smart ones just how big a problem they had on their hands, nor the importance of dealing decisively with that problem at some point. Sadly, their descendants waited far too long and couldn’t execute the dismount.

They planned to send all the blacks back to Africa once they were no longer needed.

Most of them didn't, actually. A few did, hence the ill-fated Liberian venture, but the majority of early slave importers never had a long-term vision for what they'd do with a growing slave population, and the later ones just thought they could keep the system going forever with enough force (hence, the Confederacy).

It's true that many of the founding fathers undertook projects later in life to send Africans back to Africa. But their motives varied. Jefferson believed it was necessary for self preservation - he was terrified of slave revolts - while Madison was one of many slaveowners who came to have moral qualms later in life. I also suspect that they didn't really think their projects were likely, any more than you think your project to segregate America into Whitelandia and Blacklandia is likely. They saw the problem but short of somehow convincing almost all their fellow countrymen to undertake a radical transformation of society, it wasn't going to happen.

The founding Fathers were white nationalists.

I recognize that this is a one of the woke left's favorite talking points/rhetorical bludgeons to wield against patriotic Americans, but it simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The reason that nonsense like the 1619 Project has largely failed to catch on anywhere outside the wokest of woke enclaves is that the plain text of "We hold these truths as self-evident..." is right there for all to read.

Let’s look at some of the other things Thomas Jefferson wrote about race:

In his Notes on the State of Virginia:

The first difference which strikes us is that of color. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the orangutan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of color, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labor through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labor. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed. It will be right to make great allowances for the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move. Many millions of them have been brought to, and born in America. Most of them indeed have been confined to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society: yet many have been so situated, that they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many have been brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad. The Indians, with no advantages of this kind, will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. — Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination…

… I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?’ Join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.

It would be easy for me to dig up plenty of other quotes not only from Jefferson, but also from Madison - who, remember, was the two-time president of the American Colonization Society, an organization solely and explicitly dedicated to achieving the mass deportation of blacks back to Africa - and from Franklin, and John Dickinson, and Hamilton, and Abraham Lincoln, about their explicit denial of racial equality and about their desire for the entirety of the American continents (North and South!) to be populated exclusively by white people. In Jefferson’s case, he even specified that they should all be Anglo-Saxon.

The sad thing, though, is that you purport to be a Real American Patriot, yet you don’t seem to want to hear what the Founding Fathers said outside of the one or two documents they authored that you agree with. Because in your heart of hearts, you are a bleeding-heart liberal, and you truly believe, in full agreement with the left, that racism and white supremacy are the most evil things in history. And since you don’t want to believe that the Founders were evil, you need to believe that actually they were all anti-racists, it’s right there in the Declaration, la la la la la I can’t hear you when you quote all the other stuff they said and talk about the way they actually lived their lives.

If you were to really deal with the totality of the truth about these men, you would either have to abandon them or abandon your other beliefs. And since you can’t imagine any third position other than “the Founders were racist, and that makes them evil and this country illegitimate” and “the Founders were not racist, which is the reason this country isn’t evil or illegitimate” you’re forced to just lie and obfuscate.

But there is, in fact, a third option. “The Founders were white supremacists, and that’s totally fine, and white supremacy was a legitimate goal and it doesn’t reflect negatively on the men who founded this country, or any other colonial outpost of white/Western civilization.” It’s the position I’ve been thumping since I got here, and you keep telling me that I’m the unpatriotic anti-Western America-hater, when I’m the one here trying to rescue and rehabilitate the Founders for who they actually were and what they actually said that they wanted.

If you were to really deal with the totality of the truth about these men, you would either have to abandon them or abandon your other beliefs. And since you can’t imagine any third position other than “the Founders were racist, and that makes them evil and this country illegitimate” and “the Founders were not racist, which is the reason this country isn’t evil or illegitimate” you’re forced to just lie and obfuscate.

I couldn't agree more here. Their world view is basically if the 1619 project was DR3. The funny thing is that the 1619 project is actually a more realistic view of US history because at least they acknowledge that the US and Europeans did often treat non-whites very poorly and that those actions were every popular at the time. From the responses below, I kept asking him who the real racists were that the real Patriotic Americans were fighting against in a quest for equality in the 1960's and apparently like today it was only the Democrats and white progressives:

You ask me who were the people on the opposite side of the CRA debate, and my reply is the same people who are supporting segregation today, namely college-educated white democrats. The specific terminology they use to justify their beliefs might change, but the substance of those beliefs (racial segregation, mob justice, and various flavors of Marxist nonsense) hasn't.

I don't think there are any fundamental challenges in 'important person believes very intelligent correct thing A and very dumb incorrect thing B'? The world we live in is incredibly complicated, and in an individual's attempts to comprehend it they can simultaneously attain great insight and leadership in one area while being uninterestingly incorrect or simply insane in another area. Every person alive 1k years ago held beliefs that are (correctly) deemed patently ridiculous and immoral. And that isn't just culture-war-related beliefs. Beliefs like 'the way to treat diseases is to apply herbs that don't work and pray' or 'we should kill members of other Christian sects because they are corrupting our souls'. Plenty of beliefs both people here and normies have will be (correctly) judged in the same way in the future.

It might clash with some desire to worship the whole person of a leader, but that's more a personal tendency than it is an intractable problem.

The problem is that progressives really dislike racism and hurting, or doing things that sorta look like hurting, the downtrodden, and that 'the founders were nazis' is sort of like that, not that 'the founders or nazis' is an intractable problem for a smart liberal.

They literally restricted immigration to white people and allowed slavery. This is also there for all to read. More recently, were George Wallace and Strom Thurmond members of the woke left? Are you denying that conservative whites, especially in the South, were deeply racist until very recently? David Duke almost won in Louisiana in the 1980s!

David Duke almost won because his opponent was literally a criminal who coined the phrase "vote for the crook" which has since caught on in the francophone world.

First off you seem to be conflating immigration with naturalization/citizenship. The US didn't start restricting immigration at federal level a until 1866, prior to that our borders had basically been open with anyone who could afford the boat ride welcome to settle. What was regulated was who could vote or run for office, the requirement being that you had to own property within the states and been a resident for a minimum of 5 years. Slaves obviously weren't going to be owning property, so they were out, which is where the old "wealthy white landowner" line comes from. However, the "white" part is complicated by the fact that we also see multiple occasions in the northern colonies of free blacks successfully asserting their "white" status in court by dint of being both Christian and (in kind of an inverse of the one-drop rule) being of English/European descent.

Given that most of the immigration laws of the 19th and early 20th century were specifically targeted against "Asians and other non-Christians" I think the annoying Evangelicals have a much stronger case for arguing that the US had been founded as an explicitly Christian nation, than the woke white kids do of claiming that it was founded on white nationalism.

Coming back to the issue of slavery, reading contemporary accounts of the founding it's clear that it was a very contentious topic at the time and one who's can kept getting kicked down the road. It was so contentious in fact that one of the bloodiest wars in recorded history up to that point would be fought over it. The anti-slavery camp won that one.

As for more recent history I'm not "denying that conservative whites are racist" so much as questioning your definition of "conservative". The coalition of business-owners and conservative Christians that originally backed the civil rights act and ultimately defeated segregation was largely Republican and has remained so.

The typical woke retort is to bring up the alleged "southern strategy" but this is just another one of their talking points/bludgeons that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Contra popular narratives about the two major parties pulling a switch-a-roo in the 60s as a result of the CRA, it's not until the mid to late nineties that the south becomes reliably republican which is kind of awkward for democratic partisans because it suggests that as the South became less racist, they also became less inclined to vote for the party of Woodrow Wilson and George Wallace.

You didn't respond to anything I asked you. This is just a rambling about things that apparently annoy you.

Were George Wallace and Strom Thurmond members of the woke left? Are you denying that conservative whites, especially in the South, were deeply racist until very recently? David Duke almost won in Louisiana in the 1980s.

Who were these people in the Jim Crow South voting for it? Did the woke left travel back in time and vote in those elections or did every Southern state except Texas in 1968 vote for Republicans or a segregationist after the CRA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election

The coalition of business-owners and conservative Christians that originally backed the civil rights act and ultimately defeated segregation was largely Republican and has remained so

Were the people on the opposite side of this debate? The woke left? Were the woke left the ones beating black protesters here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches#%22Bloody_Sunday%22_events

You didn't respond to anything I asked you.

I did actually.

You claimed that founding fathers restricted immigration and I pointed out that this was false.

You claimed that founding fathers allowed slavery and I replied the issue was a bit more complicated than that.

You ask me who were the people on the opposite side of the CRA debate, and my reply is the same people who are supporting segregation today, namely college-educated white democrats. The specific terminology they use to justify their beliefs might change, but the substance of those beliefs (racial segregation, mob justice, and various flavors of Marxist nonsense) hasn't.

The founding fathers never intended for this country to be populated with majority non-whites. This isn't debatable.

You claimed that founding fathers allowed slavery and I replied the issue was a bit more complicated than that.

How was it more complicated? They allowed it. Everything is complicated so that is a ridiculous "argument".

You ask me who were the people on the opposite side of the CRA debate, and my reply is the same people who are supporting segregation today

Wait so the woke left and Marxists were running the Jim Crow South? You are delusional. Today I learned that George Wallace was the same as the college educated democrats today just the "terms" are different.

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Were the people on the opposite side of this debate? The woke left? Were the woke left the ones beating black protesters here

You're asking if the people who wanted segregation back then are different from the same as people who want segregation now? Why would an affirmative answer be in any way surprising?

He thinks they are the same

You ask me who were the people on the opposite side of the CRA debate, and my reply is the same people who are supporting segregation today, namely college-educated white democrats. The specific terminology they use to justify their beliefs might change, but the substance of those beliefs (racial segregation, mob justice, and various flavors of Marxist nonsense) hasn't.

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They are doing a giga DR3 and implying the American Right and Red Tribe were apparently never racist. I'm just trying to get them to admit that's what they are doing.

they also became less inclined to vote for the party of Woodrow Wilson and George Wallace.

I know this is kinda tangential to your point, but George Wallace found Jesus, had a change of heart on race issues, and managed to talk the NAACP into endorsing his run for Alabama governor in the 80's. Kind of a microcosm of the south's racial progress.

I knew that he had a "come to Jesus moment" later in life and had approached both John Lewis and Vivian Jones asking for forgiveness but I did not know that the NAACP had endorsed his final run for governor. TIL.

Edit: Also goes to support my repeated contention that history/reality is under no obligation to conform to expectations.

If you think they were meaningfully similar to the modern white nationalists, they were also commies and ancaps and monarchists all at the same time.

But generally if you talk to them, they do reason through things similar to the worst sorts of leftists. I generally get bored with them and start using the arguments I learned here to argue for them.

Was there a single one who thought whites and blacks could live next to each other as equals? I'm not aware of a single one. On the other hand, you had many who thought them to be naturally suited for slavery, and even if they opposed slavery, were willing to compromise on it and found having a united nation more important than outlawing race based slavery. I think it's pretty obvious they didn't care very much about the well being of blacks and found them to be inferior both biologically and spiritually.

But I agree using their political beliefs and mapping it onto today's is a pointless because they lived in a very different world. They were much closer to the Thirty Years' War than our own time. But OP seems to think that they were concerned with racial equality which is frankly absurd. They would have closer views on race to white nationalists than they would OP. But they would be very different from them as well. Nationalism in Europe was just barley getting started. It was a very long time ago.

If you wind back the clock, not even a century, you'll find that public opinion was the opposite in many ways of what it is today. Do you think that means it's impossible for current opinions to change in the next century, or that change can only go in one direction?

To arrive at where we are now, people had to be threatened with guns. In the name of progress, guns were put at peoples backs to force integration. Why couldn't the same technique be used for the opposite end? I'm asking you.

I notice a kind of resignation in your tone: America's already too far gone; it's impossible to change things through immigration reform. Too many people are in interracial marriages, and it's too popular too. I've noticed this same tone with other commentators like Razib Khan. I think it's motivated by a little fearful voice in the back of your mind that says maybe it's not impossible. Maybe the vast majority of people just adapt to whatever's fashionable. People do what men with guns tell them to do. Well, most of them.

I don't think you're right that it's impossible. Anyway, it probably doesn't matter if it is or isn't. I say that there's a possible regime with America's current demographic make up that would satisfy most white nationalists. If not with the social, political, and economic policies, then with the general attitude and orientation of the government, military, and mass media.

Things can change.

My grandfather is probably more representative of the median IRL white nationalist than anyone you see on Twitter, and his opinion is that we should sterilize welfare recipients, criminals, and single mothers to keep from becoming a majority black country.

His numbers are probably not accurate. But the sentiment does exist.

I realize this is kind of besides the point, but it's pretty funny to be worried about the US becoming a majority black country. Currently the white and black fertility rates are nearly equal and a higher percentage of immigrants are white than black (though most immigrants are neither). You could make the case that the US will eventually become majority Hispanic (they have the highest fertility rate of any major group and also a high immigration rate), but majority black would require some pretty extreme changes in current trends.

100,000,000 Africans will immigrate to the United States. I'm calling it now.

You’d need a major liberalization in legal immigration policy for that and that’s unlikely if the Dems don’t have 60 seats in the senate, which is very unlikely.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have flooded across the southern border this year. We have documented evidence that a great many of them are Africans. Nobody is stopping them from coming here. Why do you believe that the immigration status quo is insufficient to allow that number to balloon to the numbers @omfalos predicted? Who or what is going to stop all those Africans from coming here, without any change to the current formal immigration regime?

We have the data on those that are stopped by CBP at the border. The top five nationalities (as of stoppings in September 2023) are Venezuelans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans and Colombians. Most black illegal migrants are Haitian, not African. Tiny numbers of Senegalese have attempted to migrate illegally, along with some other West Africans, but the US is usually able to close these loopholes as they pressure Latin American countries into tightening tourist visa restrictions for African passport holders. The challenge is overland crossings of Central American natives, and Venezuelans.

To note that Columbians, Mexicans, and Venezuelans are all by Latin American standards pretty white and are all by American immigrant standards pretty eager to assimilate and intermarry with locals. The real long term effect from this wave of immigration is that the median white American in the future will look more Italian and less Norwegian.

The mostly European upper crust are not the ones crossing the southern border. I think the long term effect will be an enormous underclass, high crime and general decay surrounding a few upper middle class enclaves. Basically what they have in South America today.

You can look at pictures from detention centers or border patrol and it's obvious that they aren't the Guillermo del Torro phenotype. They don't look anything like people from Italy or Spain.

It's unlikely even if the Dems have 60 Senate seats. I'd expect some liberalization on that front, but probably not too much beyond what we had in the Bush/Obama years. Additionally, liberalization probably wouldn't favor any particular country, so while we'd see more immigration over all, most of that would be from people who are already coming. You'd have to liberalize immigration from Africa and Africa only to have any chance of achieving a black majority.

Well yeah, his numbers aren’t accurate. But people IRL exist who think the USA should engage in coercive eugenics that ends in a whiter society.

But people IRL exist who think the USA should engage in coercive eugenics that ends in a whiter society.

Totally agreed that such people exist (though I suspect that they're not very common). In my view such an opinion is appalling, but I do think it's pretty funny to be afraid of America becoming a majority black country.

How did Zionists do it?

Most people nowadays have a non-white friend, family member, partner, or work colleague. White nationalism would mean severing these important relationships. In sum, white nationalism is dead on arrival as a political movement.

They don't have to come. Moreover, if they do have a non-European partner, their children are not going to be Europeans, so that family would not qualify. Typically people in these situations are not interested.

There's perhaps 10% of the population in any given historically-European country that would not see an issue with living among other Europeans. Some of these people will have to move to another area, to regroup.

It would not be unexpected for people living in certain localities with existing policies like "catch and release" for (non-European) murderers to move out to more hospitable locales.

Currently these locales are strictly gatekept by financial means but other options exist and will develop themselves in less authoritarian countries than the West, where freedom of association does not exist.

The more pressure is put on existing mostly-European communities to integrate, the more successful the independence movement can be, until we simply run out of Europeans.

In 50 years, every single European child will be born from a right-wing extremist family by today's standards. Perhaps they will simply integrate into some order-minded, economically-advanced Asian country in the future, before disappearing.

whatever interracial statistics are summoned up, intracial crime dwarfs it

I don't think this is particularly convincing as an issue minimization. Yes of course intraracial crime is going to be more common, just as interpersonal crime is more common than "random" violence.

The delta between white-on-black and black-on-white crime is, when adjusted per capita, something around an order of magnitude difference. For asians the gulf between interracial violence directions is even more stunning.

At least some of them have concrete - albeit quite small - policy proposals. An example is the "Idaho Project" which consists of getting the legal right to turn most of Idaho (i.e. all of it except Boise) into the white ethnostate. Idaho ex Boise is chosen because it is already like 97% white and 3% native American, and they don't seem to care much about the Native Americans.

I kind of support them. If they can turn Idaho into a white paradise, let them do it. I've never been to Idaho, I don't really have any plans to go, and don't see why anyone else should care either.

It's a pretty basic, well-accepted principle of a modern citizenship that a citizen of some country be allowed to move in and to whatever other part of the country they wish to occupy without this being illegal.

Democratic Czechoslovakia in 1930s had police keep a registry of Gypsies (the name then used for the 'Roma') who were and are prolific, mercifully mostly petty criminals and restricted them from downtown areas of large cities and so on. I don't think this was universal, more on a clan by clan basis.

All I'm saying is, it's not unprecedented.

This is not true in modern day China, you by and large can't just up and go from a rural farm to Shangai, they have a system called Hukou that pretty strongly limits where a person can live and work.

Should probably have specified that I'm talking about non-authoritarian countries, generally. Hukou is a part of the general command-style society in China.

I drove through Idaho with my dad on the way to a week in Seattle with relations. We had a very pleasant breakfast at a Denny's near the Oregon border; we'd probably still have no problems in Ida-White (what else could you name it?), as I doubt our very nice waitress recognized an old Jew when she saw one — because anyone who looks at my dad has seen one!

But what if the Parliament of Idawhite passed a law adding a couple of episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm to the elementary school curriculum? My dad has been confused with Larry David.

What about black drivers? My old roommate is now an adjunct professor at Portland State University, and between the job interview and the move, that's three times a black lesbian has driven past the exact same Denny's—and we have yet to ask anyone in thar demographic lucky enough not to share a lease with me about any omelettes they've ordered whilst en route to the Pacific Northwest.

What happens, if we give Idaho to the white nationalists, when the rest of us want to drive to Seattle? Are we just expected to not have a Grand Slam?

ETA: You could also name it Ida-Cracker. Obviously.

I was going to flip out at you for passing on White-aho, but then I read your edit, Ida-cracker is great.

Well, how about Native American reservations? And as for those: you can't, in general, move there, only the tribe that owns it can; but you can drive through and even stop at a restaurant. Any 'realistic' (for whatever value of that...) Ida-White would need to follow a similar model.

It wouldn't be in their interest to block or harass people who pass through.

I've never been to Idaho, I don't really have any plans to go, and don't see why anyone else should care either.

The extent to which the progressive project has this totalizing nature is striking, isn't it? If the wignats want to turn a chunk of Idaho into their paradise, no skin off my ass. I can see how this would become a problem if it was so successful that lots of other places wanted to do the same thing, but the idea that it's very important that a sparsely populated place remain maximally required to abide by federal "fair housing" laws and such is just weird to me. This seems like a real difference in intuition and preferences between the more libertarian-minded and authoritarians in general. I understand the desire to exert strong control over a local environment, but I just don't understand wanting to send federal authorities a thousand miles away to force integration.

In a sentence: the end goal is for white people to behave and organize like proud Jews. If that occurs, the majority on the WN-spectrum would be happy. It would ensure the continuity of white people and their culture, stave off spiritually damaging criticism regarding privilege or historical ills, and ensure that white people have an accurate and positive self-image. There would be thousands of advocacy groups that would be quick to dispel “tired euphobic canards” wherever they appear.

“End goal” is a different question than “how to”. You’re kind of blending the two together. That’s the “end goal”, but naturally a lot of people have different views on implementation.

the end goal is for white people to behave and organize like proud Jews

Most wignats remind me more of Haredim than of Zionists.

The Haredim are a lot more competent and successful than the wignats, even if what they are successful at (turning the US welfare systems in their favor) is repugnant.

The Haredim are more reminiscent of say those sections of the French ultra Catholic right where they still marry young and have lots of kids (often, like Varg iirc, as recipients of France’s extremely generous welfare for parents of large families). Most ‘regular’ US wignats aren’t ‘living the lifestyle’, (eg. are living essentially the same lives as centrist or progressive peers), which I do think is a large but possibly not fatal flaw in a lot of reactionary movements.

@Hoffmeister25 has written a bit about this in the past. Here's a couple conversations with him about this on the old site. He's also still here and presumably happy to talk about it.

There seems to be a big spectrum among wignats between “white Israel” (ie preferential immigration, special privileges, official acknowledgement as an ethnostate, but still large nonwhite population) and whatever the most extreme turner diaries or neo-nazi stuff is.

Brazil had the vision over a century ago.

The other thing we learn from brazil is that the status and relative success in society of this much more "spectrum" sort of distribution is that the darker you are, the lower you rate. There's all sorts of affirmative action and skin tone policing to determine who is "black enough" to qualify as underprivileged. In short, it is not the post-racial society being sold.

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race

"In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century."

Better dust off those phrenology books and bust out the colour charts.

Funny how leftist anti-racism winds up measuring lips to see who gets government jobs, and leftist feminism winds up putting violent male sex offenders into women's prison, and leftist sexual liberation just can't keep away from the kiddie dicks. MAPs of meaning, indeed.

I think she's saying a good portion of them don't care. I think I even heard some say that if you stop the eternal "cultural enrichment" you'll end up with a new ethnicity at some point, so pre-existing diversity is not a big deal. Don't know if you'd count them as wignats, though.

Like I said, I don't know who counts as a "wignat".

Edit: Wait, I figured it out. D'oh, you're right, of course.


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