When people make accusations of liberal bias in the media, what are they even talking about? Are they utterly disconnected from reality? The so-called mainstream media is corporate media owned by a handful of parent corporations. Their only motive is profit.
Anyway, it’s not as if there is a lack of US media with a clear political right bias, both conservative or right-wing. This includes major media with large audiences and immense influence, but some of it is more directed at niche ideological groups and demographics. There is: Fox News, Yahoo News, Newsmax, Drudge Report, The Blaze, Breitbart News Network, Rush Limbaugh Show, Sean Hannity Show, Glenn Beck Program, The Dennis Miller Show, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, the Arizona Republic, The Detroit Free Press, Dallas Morning News, Cincinnati Enquirer, Reason, National Review, Cato Journal, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, The American, The American Conservative, City Journal, Chronicles, Human Events, The Independent Review, The National Interest, The New American, Policy Review, Regulation, Townhall Magazine, World, World Affairs, Newsweek, etc. And that doesn’t even include most of the moderate conservative media that gets labeled as ‘liberal’.
It’s not as if those on the political right are lacking media to support their worldview and confirm their biases. In fact, research shows that most media consumers on the political right exist within an echo chamber. The only reason they think the rest of media is biased is because the political right media that dominates keeps repeating this and, as the old propaganda trick goes, anything repeated enough to a large enough audience will be treated as if it were fact.
Here is one of the differences between ‘liberal’ media and ‘conservative’ media. On the political left, there is maybe more diversity of sources, none of which dominate all the others. But on the political right, Fox News controls the messaging, talking points, and framing for the rest of the news outlets that share a similar bias. Related to that, most Americans are further to the left on major issues than is the corporate media, as they are further to the left of both main political parties. When you are talking about media on the political right, that is bias that is extremely to the right of the general public. Maybe that is why more Americans are increasingly turning to alternative media, primarily available through the internet.
Another thing is that there is no simple relationship between media and viewers. Plenty of social science research shows that the liberal-minded tend to be more open and curious about the world, specifically about what is different. A large part of the audience of political right media is probably not people who are on the political right. I know that has been true of me. Because of curiosity, I can’t help but look at diverse sources, even when it just makes me angry. I doubt there are as many conservatives and right-wingers consuming news reporting from the New York Times, MSNBC, and NPR as there are liberals and left-wingers with the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh (although that would depend if one is talking about symbolic identities or operational ideologies).
According to Pew (Political Polarization & Media Habits), conservatives don’t get much news from a variety of political right media, as about half of the consistently conservative get most of their information from Fox News (with 84% having watched Fox News in the past week), a pattern not seen among consistent liberals. To put it in further context, the same Pew poll shows that those who are politically mixed get more of their news from sources that right-wingers claim to have a political left bias, which seems to indicate that centrists disagree with right-wingers about perceived media bias. In fact, the more liberal the demographic, the less they relied on a single news source (other data shows that the even more liberal and leftist young demographic relies on an even greater diversity of sources with more emphasis on alternative media and social media, including “approximately 85 percent of millennials regularly follow domestic and international current events both online and through print publications. Most millennials are following at least 10 topics at any one time and around 73 percent of young people are more interested in gathering information about viewpoints that they oppose than in learning more about stances they agree with.”). Also, that Pew data shows that most of the political left media clumps closer to the political center, at least in terms of viewers of mainstream media, whereas much of the political right media is far from the average viewer.
Comparing the two sides is false equivalency. All media is assumed to be liberal or leftist if it doesn’t strongly and ideologically promote some combination of:
- blatant propaganda, political obstructionism, extreme opposition to democracy, voter suppression/purges/disenfranchisement, gerrymandering;
- near-anarchist anti-government rhetoric, Ayn Rand Objectivism, right-wing (pseudo-)libertarianism, inverted totalitarianism, neoliberal corporatism;
- proto-fascism, hyper-patriotism, war hawk neoconservatism, expansionist neo-imperialism, geopolitical interventionism, military adventurism, continuous war of aggression, military-industrial complex, intelligence-security-police state, gun nut militancy, oppressive law and order, mass incarceration, tough-on-crime laws;
- religious fundamentalism, theocracy, Creationism, anti-Semitism, pro-Israeli, Social Darwinism, eugenics, hardcore social conservatism, white supremacy, ethnonationalism, scapegoating, dog whistle politics, race-baiting, red-baiting, attack politics, fear-mongering, hate-mongering, paranoid conspiracy theory;
- climate change denialism, anti-science, anti-intellectualism, anti-immigration, anti-public education, anti-welfare, anti-immigration, basically anti-everything that involves social democracy, civil society, human rights, compassion and basic decency;
- reverse political correctness, demagoguery, ideological purity, openly loyal Republican partisanship;
- et cetera.
Everything else is part of a powerful secret cabal of leftist special interest groups, Jewish media moguls, journalist operatives, devious intellectual elite, and God-hating scientific dogmatists who have somehow taken over the global corporate media and are conspiring to push Democratic brainwashing, liberal indoctrination, left-wing propaganda, and the Communist-Islamic-Secular takeover of society. Yet oddly, when considering the details, that supposed liberal or leftist corporate media expresses views that are about the same as or to the right of majority public opinion.
The moderate-to-center-right media gets accused of being far left, the actual far left gets entirely ignored, and the far right media controls the entire framing of the debate about bias. Those who identify with or lean toward far right politics (liberarians, Objectivists, theocrats, etc) are regularly heard in the political right media. Many have their own shows, even on major outlets such as Fox News. When there are political campaigns and debates, we hear from panels that include these right-wing views. But when was the last time you noticed an equivalent openly ideological, hardcore left-winger (communist, anarcho-syndicalist, anti-imperialist, etc) with any prominent position in the supposed liberal-to-leftist media, with their own show or as a regular guest?
If you want to know the actual bias, look for who is making the accusation and getting heard. It is the right-wingers with massive backing from right-wing corporate media who are declaring that corporate media is left-wing. In their control of political debate, these right-wingers are using misdirection as part of their propaganda model. The fact of the matter is that all “mainstream media” is corporate media and, in our society, that means powerful big money corporatist media that is inseparable from the corporatist political system. There is no separation between the elites in government, corporations, and media. It’s all the same establishment of wealth and power.
It’s all rather pointless. According to corporate media and corporatist politicians, the views held by a majority of Americans—such as support for higher minimum wage, public option or single payer healthcare, abortion rights, stronger gun regulations, etc—represents an operational liberal bias (as opposed to the symbolic rhetoric so commonly used by the powerful to control debate and manipulate voters), which might be true in a sense if one is to call majority public opinion to be a bias. Maybe that is related to why, along with such negative opinions of ‘mainstream’ politics, only 6% of Americans (2% of young adults) trust ‘mainstream’ media. When we talk about bias, we have to ask who is being accused of bias, who is making the accusations of bias, what is the accuser’s bias, and how this relates to the biases of the general public along with various demographics. Compared to most Americans, the entire ‘mainstream’ media is biased toward the right-wing. But it’s unsurprising that, according to the right-wing, the rest of media and all of reality is biased to the left-wing. I’m not sure why we should take these right-wingers seriously. It does tell me much about corporate media that they love to obsess over and promote these right-wing accusations that largely come out of corporate media.
These days, with even NPR funded by big biz, where in the ‘mainstream’ media is someone supposed to look for hard-hitting news reporting and morally courageous investigative journalism about the wealthy and powerful who own the corporate media and control the corporatist political system? Once upon a time, back when newspapers were the main source of info for the majority of Americans, most newspapers had both a business section and a labor section. There also used to be prominent newspapers that were dedicated solely or primarily to labor issues. Is it surprising that as almost all ‘mainstream’ media has been bought up by big biz that the news reporting critical of big biz has disappeared from what has become corporate media pushing a corporatist worldview?
If there is a liberal bias among the corporate media gatekeepers, it is specifically the neoliberalism of inverted totalitarianism that is supported by a state-linked corporatist propaganda model. Calling that ‘liberal’ would comfort few liberals and even fewer leftists. There is a kind of liberalism that dominates in our society, including in ‘mainstream’ media, but the issue is about what kind of liberalism is this. Even many conservatives claim to be ‘liberal’ (e.g., classical liberals). So, what is this supposed ‘liberal’ bias? Is the corporate media actually biased to the left, considering the viewing public is itself biased even further to the left? So, left of what exactly… left of the right-wing?
It is true that the entertainment media is often rather liberal, but that is because it is seeking to make profit by entertaining the fairly liberal American viewing public. Liberalism sells because we live in a liberal society. There is nothing shocking about it. On a broad level, our entire society and everyone in it is liberal. Even American conservatives are, in this sense, just varieties of liberals. The liberal paradigm has dominated the West for a couple of centuries now. But it is a liberalism of the status quo, not a liberalism of left-wing revolution. This liberalism is not just neoliberal in its capitalism and corporatism. It also has much of that old school Whiggish progressivism favored by the classical liberals, the ideology that promoted imperialism, colonialism and genocide in order to spread freedom and democracy. It’s a paternalistic, authoritarian, and condescending liberalism that has become the heart of so-called American ‘conservatism’. The unscrupuous libertinism of our society may seem opposite of conservative ideals, but it is inseparable from capitalism and certainly not embraced by much of the political left.
Is the political right hoping to enforce right-wing bias onto the public, no matter what they’d prefer, just to make sure they are indoctrinated properly? The problem is those who complain the most about a ‘liberal’ bias are the very people who are the least conservative. Instead, they are right-wing reactionaries who in their radicalism want to push society even further into a skewed fantasy that has nothing to do with traditionalism.
Just listen to president Trump complain about the media and have his words parroted by the alt-right, even as he is the least conservative president in US history. In comparison, he makes Obama’s administration seem like a stalwart defense of traditionalism. After decades of capitulating to the far right and serving their corporatist interests, it’s amusing to watch some in the center-right corporate media finally protesting because their status quo is under attack by the far right. To the far right, the corporate media can never be far enough right, at least not until they are under authoritarian control of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.
I wanted to finish with a different but connected issue. The Pew data I mentioned above offered something that right-wingers latched onto. Consistent liberals are more likely than consistent conservatives to stop talking to someone because of political disagreement. But what this misses is that liberals are more likely to talk to people who they disagree with. A larger percentage of conservatives, because they live in ideological isolation and are trapped in a media echo chamber, never interact with anyone they disagree with. They can’t stop talking to people they never started talking to in the first place.
As a typical person on the political left, I seek out diverse news sources and so interact with diverse people. For every person I intentionally stop talking to, I meet dozens of other new people with all kinds of views. So, I still end up interacting with more people I disagree with than the average consistent conservative.
This is relevant to the perception of bias. Conservatives are less likely to actively seek diverse sources of news and less likely to interact with diverse people. Maybe it’s partly because, as data has shown, the most consistent conservatives tend to live in homogeneous communities and so are never forced to acknowledge anything outside of their reality tunnel (whereas liberals are attracted to diverse communities for the very reason they are diverse). What this means is that the political right accusation of political left bias isn’t based on much if any actual familiarity with media outside of the political right.
From my political left perspective, it is a thousand times better to listen to someone even if you later decide the interaction is undesirable than to never listen at all, to preemptively shut out all views that disagree, to accuse others of bias before you can even honestly claim to know what their views are.
* * *
About this topic, there is a bad article by Ross Douthat, The Missing Right-of-Center Media.
I only mention it because the comment section is a worthy read, helping to explain everything wrong with articles like that. What makes it amusing is that it is an article from the New York Times, supposedly among the most leftist of the liberal media. The reality is that there is no missing right-of-center media. The New York Times, publishing writers like Douthat, is right-of-center media.
More helpful are two answers to a Quora question, Which media outlets in the USA are right-wing and which are left-wing? One answer is from William Goff and another from Mitchell Langbert.
I could offer tons of links to articles and such, of course. But there is no point. Besides, I’ve written about this enough before. The only reason I wrote this new post was because of the callers I heard on CSPAN who probably represent the minority of the population that still gets most of their news from corporate ‘mainstream’ media. I still retain the capacity to be shocked by how many people still don’t understand such basic things as how media bias actually operates.
Anywho, here are my previous posts:
Conservatives Watching Liberal Media
Bias About Bias
What Does Liberal Bias Mean?
This Far Left And No Further
Controlling the Narrative: Part 1
Response to Rightwing Misinformation
Black and White and Re(a)d All Over
NPR: Liberal Bias?
The Establishement: NPR, Obama, Corporatism, Parties
Man vs Nature, Man vs Man: NPR, Parking Ramps, etc
* * *
Marmalade 
For what it is worth, I remember getting into a discussion (it was a cordial discussion) years ago with somebody I considered “far right”. His view was that Fox News was liberal. From talking with him over the years, I can truly understand that he believed that. He stopped discussing things with me when I started using easily proven facts to disprove his arguments.
You are correct though, I worked in Television News for years, it is all profit driven. Yes, it may have a slant, but that is usually because of the audience they are after. It is truly impossible to be completely apolitical. The BBC and Der Spiegal may come close, but because we are human, news is always going to lean one way or another.
An aspect of a point I was making is that the most liberal part of the population is the very same part that pays the least attention to corporate ‘mainstream’ media.
From a big biz perspective, such people are less relevant because they aren’t an audience that can be easily targeted by mass media and by mass advertising. There is little profit to be had from these viewers. The audience of mass media skews older and more conservative, an easier target audience for advertisers. This older generation still has most of the money in society as well, since the economy has hit hardest the younger generations (delaying their careers, marriages, having children, house buying, etc).
The alternative media that the young and more liberal prefer is primarily internet-based. The more liberal and younger generation has been a harder demographic toward which to direct advertising. The advertising model of media hasn’t translated well to internet, at least not so far. The largest profits are still to be found in the ‘mainstream’ media of network news and cable news, although these profits will be hard to maintain under the present model of mass media.
So, mass media isn’t necessarily slanted toward the majority of the population. Rather, it is slanted toward traditional audiences of mass media, which is a shrinking proportion of the population although still very large because the older generations are living longer. The profit model of media will change over time, but the entrenched interests of big media aren’t likely to change quickly. As media has become more concentrated in fewer mega-corporations, the media market has increasingly taken on the characteristics of an oligopoly.
There is a ton of alternative media out there. The problem is that the audiences for individual alternative media outlets tends to be fairly small and so not particularly profitable. I’m sure that most of the alternative media is non-profit, intentionally or not. Advertising money gets so watered down on the internet. And advertising has become less effective since, as it has become more pervasive, people have learned to ignore most of it.
Because most media is profit-driven, it’s going to be focused on those with the most money to spend. There is little reason to produce news reporting for the majority of the population that has the least amount of the wealth in society. The mass audience of mass media is a shrinking demographic, as wealth becomes ever more concentrated and the middle class stops being the engine of the economy. Neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times is directed toward the majority of Americans in the lower classes. Trying to squeeze further money from the lower classes is going to be a losing proposition, if our economy doesn’t improve for most Americans in the near future.
This makes standard polling of ‘mainstream’ audiences unrepresentative. This is because the audiences of corporate ‘mainstream’ media isn’t typical of the majority of Americans. Most Americans are in the lower classes and the lower classes consume the least amount of news media. Partly, they consume the least amount of news media because the least amount of news media is directed at them. I’m sure that back in the day, when there were labor sections in newspapers and labor newspapers, more lower class Americans consumed the news media that was directed toward them. So, as inequality grows in the economy, it will become further apparent in big biz media that will less and less represent the American public as a whole.
This is obviously problematic in a country that pretends to be a democracy.
“The framing is wrong, I think. These are not “states Trump won” they are “states Hillary lost”. I think Bernie (or a generic non-Hillary Democrat; maybe Biden) would’ve won a lot of states Hillary lost, and won the election.
In the primaries, Bernie was overwhelmingly popular with certain demographics. Independents for one, but also rural voters (which happens to be more white people).
It’s true that Hillary won the primary big in the southern red states. But in some of those states, like Georgia, polls were showing Bernie might’ve beaten Trump. I think in the southern states, party identity is a big issue along racial lines for historical reasons. So a lot of loyal democrats in the south chose the Clinton name because that name is nearly synonymous with the party.
I think the problem democrats are having isn’t at all to do with being too liberal or too far left, it’s with being too elite. Democrats win urban areas. They need to focus on how to talk plainly and identify with people who are not urbanites.
I was born, raised, and still live in a rural area in the south, and people down here value the simpler things. What Bernie had to say registered with people. That’s how these 2018 democrats need to play it. It’s not about moving left or right, it’s about moving down from elitism — back down to earth.
They also need to undertake a massive effort to be sure that every single young person of voting age actually goes and votes on election day, since young people will 4-to-1 vote dem. They need to start on this immediately. Engaging young people on social media, using apps, memes, having gotv going viral: this is how they can win going forward.”
I suspect Sanders would have done as well or better than Clinton in the South and the areas of minority concentration outside the South.
He had already won the majority of young minorities (and probably poor minorties), a demographic(s) that tends to vote at low rates but would have come out to vote for Sanders. As for older minorities who vote, most of them are strongly partisan Democrats. They would have voted for Sanders simply because he was the Democratic candidate. So, unlike Clinton, Sanders would have combined younger and older minorities (I’m sure along with minorities across the class divide, specifically poor and middle class).
Sanders definitely would have combined the rural and urban vote, both white and minority. He would have done that because he was attractive to a wider diversity of voters on the political left, especially the poor and working class who are the majority of the population in the entire country, whether you are talking about rural or urban.
People forget that most poor and working class whites are in urban areas. And they forget that large populations of minorities are still in rural areas. I recall that rural Hispanics showed stronger support for Trump and no doubt they would have preferred to vote for Sanders, especially as the support of young minorities became so obvious that the old media couldn’t ignore it any longer. Older minorities would have been persuaded by the passion of their children and grandchildren.
The very demographics that Sanders did best with were the largest demographics and those that crossed other demographic lines. He had wider appeal and stronger support. Clinton was trying to target very specific demographics, hoping to cobble together a winning coalition. Sanders didn’t need to cobble anything together. He was popular, plain and simple. By way of a morally honest message, he would have been able to bridge the class conflicts and racial conflicts that have torn apart the Democratic Party through decades of pandering to identity politics.
The Democratic Party or any third party that wants to promote genuine progress has to treat potential voters as humans worthy of respect, as Americans who deserve to be represented, no matter identity politics. This is most true for the younger generations that have been shown to have less interest in identity politics, as they take diversity as a given.
The reality is t hat we have more in common with working class conservatives than we do with wealthy people.
If we could somehow convince them of our joint class struggle, I think that we could ally. That may seem cray, but the reality is that most of us are not wealthy.
In the meantime …
This is not a party on our side.
As polling shows:
Most Americans, across class and racial lines, don’t trust big gov, big biz, and big media; and don’t trust either major political party or either of their recent presidential nominees. Most Americans believe the political and economic system is corrupt and rigged.
All in all, that is powerful point of agreement for such a large, diverse population. We have a common enemy, our mutual overlords. That’s not a bad starting point toward popular support for change.
It’s easy to think of all people on the right as racists, but the reality is not that simple. I’ve worked with a large number of conservatives in the past, and as loathsome as their politics is, they were some of the nicest people to work with. I think it’s part of the conservative mindset to be extremely loyal to anyone they consider “one of them” (e.g. family, friends, coworkers), while being capable of the most savage cruelty towards everyone else. Remember that even Ann Coulter once dated Dinesh D’souza (an Indian American) and Andrew Stein (a Jewish Democrat).
That exact argument was made by J. Scott Wagner in the Liberal’s Guide to conservatives. You may have seen his name around here because he comments on occasion. He is a liberal who lives near the Atlantic coast in the North. Another liberal who makes a similar argument is Jonathan Haidt. He had a revelation when he lived with a conservative family in India when he was younger..
I personally find this unsurprising, since I’ve known many conservatives over the years in the Midwest and the South. Political ideology rarely plays much role in personal relationships, no matter who are the people involved. I don’t think that should be surprising. But it can be easy to forget with how our political parties and corporate media like to turn everything into divisive conflict.
I think the division people face is more class than anything. If you are a working class liberal, you’ve probably been interacting with conservatives your entire life. It is only the middle-to-upper class liberal who sometimes is shocked that conservatives are normal human beings. It is harder to ideologically segregate oneself as a working class liberal. Even in a smaller town like this, the lower classes and upper classes do live in different worlds.
It’s also not just about racism. The same pattern is found with religion, gender identity, etc. Having a Islamic coworker or a lesbian daughter can transform a conservative’s view of such issues or at least cause them to be more tolerant on a personal level. Humans are humans first. Few people would sacrifice a close relationship for ideology, at least not under normal conditions.
Given where I grew up where the voting patterns were about split even I’d generally agree. Granted it was not a much more conservative area.
Polarization is bad for the country. We can’t let polarization get worse
Analysis of each state’s defectors from Obama: “more Obama voters defected to third- and fourth-party candidates than the number who supported Mr. Trump. In Pennsylvania, the Democrats’ problem was not with white voters, but with African-Americans. Mrs. Clinton actually improved on the Democratic 2012 results with whites, but over 130,000 unenthused black voters stayed home, and she lost by about 44,000 votes.”
That confirms my assessment in my post about Trump not being the white savior. It wasn’t the whites Democrats lost to Republicans that primarily or solely cost Clinton the election. Still, those whites do matter, assuming that winning future elections is important.
Many of those whites didn’t like Trump, but they hated Clinton more. Many of them were old school labor union Democrats with loyalty to New Deal Progressivism. The fact of the matter is Trump sounded more like a New Deal Progressive than did Clinton.
As a white guy who is working class and a union member, let me explain what pissed off many people like me. The leadership of a number of unions supported Clinton. They did this without asking their union members who they wanted the union to support. It turns out most union members supported Sanders. So, the betrayal by their own union leadership rubbed salt into the would of the betrayal by the Democratic establishment.
When you treat people like they don’t matter, they’ll likely return the favor. Most Americans, working class white and otherwise, don’t want to be treated like pawns in the power games of the ruling elite.
I honestly think his claims of where he fit in are nothing more than a simple and brilliant political ploy and identity politics. We are talking about a man who was raised by an extremely liberal, non-religious white woman, a Muslim Indonesian man, spent many of his formative years in Hawaii and Indonesia (not known for their black population or black cultures), then was raised by his white, upper middle class grandparents and sent straight into white, ivy league, wealthy social circles. I can’t think of more examples of being far removed from most black people than these. I really can’t. And the one time he went to visit his biological father, you can tell from the photos that he was not a happy camper and did not physically fit in. He simply was not in a black American or African environment of any kind, period. At all. I am willing to bet I grew up around more black Americans and am more familiar with them than he is. These are just facts. Culturally, he is as white American as it comes. And him being treated like a black man by others does nothing to change that.
I agree he isn’t deserving of any contempt (at least not more than any other lying POS politician), but I also strongly believe his claims to relate to your average black American are a bold-faced lie. He is no different from any other politician who pumps feel-good bullshit and identity politic lies to garner support from his chosen demographic target of voters. He knew large numbers of black people would be his biggest fans. And he was right. And he did absolutely nothing for black Americans, as a whole, compared to any other modern, post-Civil Rights era American president. Nothing. And many black Americans still worship him because of what he represents to them- possibility. He essentially used black Americans and their desire to be upwardly mobile (perfectly reasonable desire) to take their vote. There are more black Americans waking up to this fact, particularly when looking at the current state of black people in America and what has been happening in his “hometown” (it’s not) of Chicago. And they’re starting to speak out and they’re pissed. They know that their fellow black people got played. But when have any of us not been played? More business as usual. A heartfelt netflix drama easily plays into that. This is no different from the silver-tongued King who pretends to be a pauper.
Personally, I would have had a bit more respect for him if he had just admitted that he felt mixed internally like he truly is, but only looked one way to most others (unless you’re an African, they can tell) and that made his life difficult. And like many mixed race guys who are part white, he also likes white women. Why wouldn’t he? It would have been honest and it would have made sense. And as another mixed man, it would have made me relate to him and understand him better. But there aren’t enough of us mixed people to get those big voting numbers, so trying to relate to us and his true self is going to be left behind, of course.
Identity politics obscures very real differences. A wealthier black has more in common with wealthy white people than poor blacks. Wealthy blacks still have to deal with issues of racism, but racism is a million times easier to deal with when one has other forms of privilege. Wealth is a privilege that is not to be underestimated in a society like ours that is ruled by wealth.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629804000642
New England is the whitest region of the United States. It also has the highest percentage of WASPs and the highest concentration of those with English ancestry. They are a racially and ethnically homogeneous population, not even particularly diluted by the earlier waves of ethnic white immigrants like Germans and Irish.
I wonder how much English ethnocentrism remains in New England. Maybe it is because the English ethnic whites in New England vote Democratic that the non-English ethnic whites in New England would vote Republican. The abstract didn’t even mention those of English ancestry, which is an odd omission in discussing a region with the most English ancestry in the country.
That was a fairly decent debate. The last set of comments were typical bigotry, though.
Mainstream media may suck but after a while you realize that alt right talking points are repetitive and not insightful either and pseudo intellecutla
I’d be more open to alt-right ideas if they were more interesting. It’s the problem I have with HBD. I don’t think HBD is inherently wrong. But it gets boring after a while.
Few HBDers seem capable of incorporating new data and articulating new speculations based on that new data. All they do is simply repeat what they already believed before they ever saw any data and then cherrypick the data to confirm what they believe.
I wouldn’t mind all the speculations if they weren’t turned into just-so stories and treated as facts. I love to speculate, even when not politically correct. I fully support the craziest speculations. For example, I’ve always had a soft place in my heart for conspiracy theories.
Speculate away, but just keep it interesting. The greatest sin is being boring. There should be no sacred cows. All that alt-righters do is attack others in order to divert attention away from their own failed thinking. They don’t have the courage of their convictions.
http://www.theonion.com/infographic/what-alt-right-53747
Thanks for the laugh. I needed that after a day slaving at work.
“History: Movement began in earnest after Ronald Reagan aired his famous “It’s Morning In Cuckmerica” campaign ad in 1984”
Lol americas going to shit
Honestly life is too short to be consumed by skin color
The alt-fucktarded alt-right live in an alt-reality. The alt-right is simply the same losers who in the past played Dungeons and Dragons in their parents’ basement. It’s fantasy role-playing that has taken on new form because of the internet.
“I like many white people are about 5 different things: German, Irish, Spanish, polish, welsh, and something else I can’t even remember which all amounts to being white. I am so fragmented that I have no idea really what cultural traditions I might have spawned from…so to me I am just American who grew up on mac and cheese with hotdogs. I assume a lot white people feel similar to me in the sense that our ethnicity has been so diluted you almost feel void of a past beyond your immediate family. You ask some white people what they are and it’s often a long list of crazy places that means nothing to anyone. I mean really what the hell does being “welsh” mean…nobody knows. I have a few friends who are very rich in their culture, be it Italian, Greek, Japanese, etc and I do somewhat envy the warm sense of oneness they seem to enjoy through a rich tradition of food, celebration, and language that has been past down to them from generations past. I feel like they have a story with roots. “
Many whites lost their ethnic identities and cultures rather quickly and recently. My dad visited one set of grandparents who were immigrants. But he never remembers them talking about it. He didn’t even know they were immigrants as a child.
It was a silencing based on fear and shame because in the early 20th century it could be dangerous to be considered an ethnic white. And the only way to get out of desperate poverty was to assimilate. It’s the same reason so many light-skinned blacks chose to pass as white. It wasn’t a choice freely made.
Speaking of propaganda, this is the stuff that radicalized dylann roof
http://archive.is/NKZ14
I remember that guy. In the comments section, I had a long debate with him. There are certain people like that who really do seem disconnected from reality, maybe even seriously mentally ill. That goes far beyond the standard race realism of many HBDers.
What a fucking trainwreck
So, Native Americans should have kept out the English, the English should have kept out all the non-English ethnics, the non-English ethnics in the non-English colonies (e.g., New York) should have kept out the English out, everyone should have kept out the Scots-Irish, all earlier immigrants should have kept out all later immigrants, Puritans should have kept out the Anglicans, the Anglicans should have kept out the Puritans, the Puritans and Anglicans should have kept out the Anabaptists and Quakers and Catholics, and on and on.
But anyone who forces their way in by brute military power, such as the English, has the right violently oppress everyone who came before them and after them because might makes right. So, I guess non-whites and non-Christians should be allowed into the US, by this logic, just as long as they are able to brutally oppress enough whites and Christians. This isn’t an argument. It’s just saying whoever wins through the most violence gets to do whatever they want until someone more violent comes along.
Through all the changes English culture still dominates though. We speak English regardless of background
But that wasn’t true for most of American history. There were always large swaths of the country that spoke languages other than English.
Lawrence Welk, born in the US and as white as they come, grew up speaking only German until he learned English in his teens. Some Americans alive today remember attending German-language public and private schools in the Upper Midwest.
Only a few generations ago, there probably were more people who didn’t speak English at home than those who did. Many of them, besides having non-English schools, also read non-English newspapers and attended non-English churches. In early Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin complained because official documents and notices had to be printed in multiple languages so that all citizens could read them.
Even today, one in five Americans are non-English speakers. And there is plenty of non-English media available. Cable has non-English channels. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc provide large number of non-English shows. In some communities in the Southwest, you probably could go for weeks without ever speaking English. Most major companies, banks, and such will provide services in other languages. Hospitals, police departments in large cities keep non-English speakers on staff.
Large non-English speaking populations is an American tradition going back centuries. The dominance of English has been tenuous and only became apparent with the Silent Generation.
I think his logic is “it’s ultimately fine as long as they look like me”
That is the complication. Those earlier ethnic Europeans didn’t think those of different ethnicities looked like them. It took generations of interbreeding before the American mutt developed and we could even speak of white people. In the early 20th century, officials kept separate data for Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, Irish Americans, etc. No one would have claimed they all looked alike. If several generations of blacks and whites interbred, guess what? They’d all look alike. That is the fear, that the other will become assimilated.
He also cites this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2555431/
Which doesn’t say what he means it says.
It can also be changed too, based on exposure
If it is to re-establish itself as a party with a truly national appeal, the Democratic Party needs to define what it means to be “left.” For many people, being “left” today is exclusively a matter of being socially liberal. I’m socially liberal myself and thus endorse the values represented by social liberalism. I’m also aware that the Democrats need to do a lot better than they’ve done in areas not noted for their social liberalism. I remain firmly convinced that the Democratic Party will experience much greater political success across the country by returning to its roots as an economically liberal party which sought to expand the rights of labor and the interests of the less fortunate over big business and other wealthy interests. The Democrats need to make a concerted effort to convince voters in the Rust Belt, the South and the Plains states that they are looking out for them too, and they can do this by promoting economic policies that work for everyone, not just the wealthy. THAT’s the kind of “left” that the Democrats should seek.
Feb. 21, 2017 at 11:39 a.m.
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JerryChicago
Democrats will never win back the white working class vote by pandering to illegal immigrants or even legal immigrants who bring nothing to the table except driving down wages. We do not have a labor shortage in the USA, we have a glut. We don’t have jobs Americans won’t do, we only have wages Americans refuse to work for. The Democrats are completely tone deaf to this issue, it seems all they want are cheap nannies, cheap landscapers, cheap construction workers, and cheap farm workers. Oh sure, they pay lip service to the “working class” but to Democrats that’s just a code word for the small fraction of unionized workers who work on large projects (like building train stations and skyscrapers) or work for the government. Everyone else they force to compete with foreigners working for 1/3 the pay who usually don’t even pay taxes because they get paid cash under the table. We’re not fooled by your rhetoric any longer when we can see first hand how the jobs follow the companies who hire low-wage foreign labor while everyone else sees their work slowly disappear.
So keep moving left, keep pandering to illegal immigrants, keep promising to bring in even more low-wage foreign workers and watch your party become irrelevant outside of your urban bubbles.
Feb. 21, 2017 at 11:38 a.m.
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Undocumented immigrants are such a small percentage of the population. So many talk about them as if there is a vast army of undocumented immigrants waiting at the borders with sleeper cells in every American city.
The fact of the matter is that undocumented immigration was lower than normal during the Bush and Obama administrations, largely because of economic problems in the US. Heck, Obama deported more immigrants than any president in history. If mass deportation is what pandering looks like, the undocumented immigrants would prefer less pandering. Anyway, immigrants to the US (documented and undocumented) have a lower violent crime rate than US-born citizens.
It’s not like anyone is encouraging undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigration is one of America’s oldest traditions. Hispanics have been traveling back and forth across North America for seasonal work for longer than the United States existed, all the way back to the time when most of North America (including most of the present US) was part of the Spanish Empire. These are migrant workers, doing what they’ve been doing for centuries. It’s nothing new.
What is new is neoliberal globalization with international trade deals. Many of the immigrants are people who lost their farms and jobs because of NAFTA. And then there is our overthrowing governments, training and arming brutal militant/terrorist groups, and creating chaos through drug wars in Latin America which turns large numbers of people into refugees. Are we Americans absolutely stupid?
As I always like to say, if you want people to stay in their own countries, then quit being evil sociopaths by fucking them over just because you are the most powerful country in the world. We do morally depraved things to innocent people and then wonder why there are consequences to our own actions. It’s like throwing a rock straight up in the air and then getting angry at the rock coming back down when it hits you on the head.
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-opinion-on-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-civil-rights-act-of-1964/
That is good to see.
” was with you until the last paragraph. There are many Trump supporters who can come to recognize their white privilege, just as I have. They can come to recognize the systemic racism and prejudices that exist in society and become committed to stamping them out. I used to read far right wing news. I used to be registered Republican. The me of 15 years ago probably would have voted Trump. The me of today spent 13 years abroad and I witnessed the government choking out the free press, a coup attempt, a crackdown on freedoms, and a government purge that is still to this day making people’s heads spin. You know what is perpetuating it? Polarization. Us vs. them. Mutual vilification.
I get Trump supporters. I get how they think. I grew up in Smalltown, PA. I also know that the majority aren’t bad people. They just haven’t been exposed to the right conversations, and they need people who care about them to respectfully engage them in these conversations. If we don’t, who will?
A change in philosophy takes time. Full recognition of one’s privilege doesn’t usually happen overnight. I’m still learning the American history that wasn’t taught in schools. So even if someone hasn’t “arrived” just yet, we still need to seek common ground and build bridges.
Where is that from?
You know ppl say sjw is divisive but I think the alt-right is the same
Certainly, being a social injustice warrior doesn’t make the world a better place. That is what much of the alt-right ends up being, simply against social justice and not for anything besides fear, hatred, and bigotry.
Yeah it’s pretty alienating.
Yeah the USA has gotten really diverse vs just English descent but he’s like “looks are what matter” which is a nonwhites is pretty alienating.
There also isn’t really a race-American culture besides black American maybe. White Americans are too diverse to be a single culture not just ethnically but regionally and class wise
The problem alt-right white supremacists face is most whites disagree with them or simply don’t give a shit about them. Most people, no matter the race, simply want to live their lives. Alt-right ideology is irrelevant to anyone other than alt-right ideologues. And I doubt there is a large movement of alt-righters.
The typical American has better things to do, such as working and taking care of their families. Alt-righters are people with too much time on their hands. I suspect the average alt-righter is comfortable middle class, the kind of person who lacks real concrete problems in their immediate life. Certainly, few poor people have the time and energy to constantly be on the internet ranting about SJWs, immigrants, etc.
Lol that dude literally doesn’t give a shit about anything but race. Literally nothing else policy wise matters. “I’ll be okay no matter what economically, climate, I just care about race.” Dude is clearly well off or living with his parents or something. Or 14.
It makes you wonder what would happen if people like that ever were faced with the kinds of real problems so many other Americans deal with on a daily basis. Would hatred of minorities and immigrants comfort them if they found themselves without basic healthcare, suffering from treatable diseases they can’t afford to treat, in overwhelming debt, unemployed, homeless, or mass incarcerated? Are these the kind of people, if they found themselves in prison, would immediately join the neo-Nazis and go on hating non-whites instead of questioning the system that puts so many whites and non-whites into prison for non-violent crimes? If they were homeless, would they join a gang of white homeless people in order to protect their white privilege to scrounge through dumpsters?
This is all pretty big picture stuff. Anything in your own life you want to see different?
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[–]CintamaniNimble Navigator 9 days ago
Like what? Taxes? No I don’t really care for that stuff, just a waste of time.
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[–]iamiamwhoamiNon-Trump Supporter[S] 9 days ago
Alternatively do you expect anything in your life to disappear if Trump’s policies go into effect? Does anything in your life depend on globalization? Your job? The things you buy?
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[–]CintamaniNimble Navigator 9 days ago
Nope, I would never put my well being in the hands of others. I’ll be fine no matter what happens.
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[–]iamiamwhoamiNon-Trump Supporter[S] 9 days ago
You’re completely independent from the economy? That’s amazing actually. Do you live on a self sustaining farm or something?
Ugh
“Progressives are beholden to an ideology (not coincidentally, the exact but equally extreme and insane opposite of Nazis racial ideology) of white racial self-denial and self-contempt, which one can understand the attraction of for racial minorities, but it does not bode well for the future of America.
America was founded by white nationalists, who are now demonised, creating a great deal of cognitive dissonance, i.e. Orwellian double think.
So long as whites were the dominant ethnic group, America was a stable democracy, but this is rapidly changing.
Progressives have convinced themselves that race, i.e. America’s changing demographics, doesn’t matter, but they are badly mistaken.
If America isn’t to tear itself apart in the years ahead, it needs to start giving some very serious though to the reality that race does matter. Not in the way racial supremacists believe it does, but because central to any deep and meaningful sense of both personal and group, i.e. genuine national, identity.
This is a BIG challenge, which requires an evolutionary understanding of human nature, society and the state: http://philosopherkin.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/civilisation-evolutionary-c…”
//philosopherkin.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/political-implications-of-evolutionary.html?m=1
It is so amazingly simpleminded. Do people like this ever momentarily have an original thought that doesn’t fit into the ideological script they’ve been taught? If they do occasionally have an original thought, however fleeting, does it terrify them?
Human beings are territorial, aggressive, social and hierarchical. All of these are in our genes; chimpanzees are much the same. This means several things are hardwired to be natural mental activities for us:
-To belong to a group of other humans, and work together with them for survival of the group as a whole
-To try and climb to the top of any group of which one is a member
-To identify their own group as “us,” a positive and valued thing; and any other humans as “them,” a negative and objectionable thing
-To attempt to dominate the Them in favor of the Us
All of these are survival traits, which we evolved while living in an environment where we usually formed bands of between 20 and 200 individuals and rarely saw any humans beyond our own band. When we did, we usually fought them for resources, since if they were where we could see them, they were also planning to hunt and gather in the same general area where we were planning to use that food.
When we’re living in towns of thousands, or cities of millions, however, the little Othering circuits in our brains go haywire. We don’t exactly have a natural band anymore, so we choose up in-groups based on religion or ideology or appearance, so that we have somebody to feel like is on our side. And, in so doing, we inevitably create an out-group, made of everybody who isn’t in the in-group, which we feel is a threat to us and to our group.
That’s where our territorial/hierarchical tendencies show up, and we begin trying to dominate the Other, and put them decisively lower on the social scale than we and our in-group are.
That, in a nutshell, is the source of practically all human bigotries. Racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, ideological identification, you name it. It’s why a political party which claims to be dedicated to “family values” will re-elect a congressman who forced his pregnant mistress to have an abortion so his wife wouldn’t find out… because whatever he’d done, he was part of their clan. It’s why so many evangelical Christians are rushing to defend a (very reluctantly) confessed child molester, at the same time as they accuse gay people of being child molesters (without a shred of evidence) — one is part of their clan, the other isn’t.
When there are no natural divisions between Tribe and Other, we divide based on any characteristics we can. Race is just one of the characteristics along which some people’s minds will divvy up the human population, and when they do, you can be sure they’ll try to arrange for their tribe to be On Top. Because that’s what humans have evolved impulses to want to do… figure out who’s in your tribe and who is the Other; attempt to climb to the top of the hierarchy within your tribe, and help your tribe climb to the top of the hierarchy against all the other tribes. When race is the trait by which somebody divides the population, they’re a racist. Other people have different dividing lines.
I’ve been thinking about identity politics this week. There is something strange about it. It isn’t just about race and gender but also class. When I read about earlier societies, even only as far back as Europe in the Middle Ages, it occurs to me that those people wouldn’t even comprehend our identity politics. They had social identities, but they were much more organic identities rather than these broad politicized abstractions.
I was reading that again. Such simpleminded rhetoric is endless. It just goes on and on. No new thought or fact can penetrate the haze of dogmatism.
“Human beings are territorial, aggressive, social and hierarchical. All of these are in our genes; chimpanzees are much the same.”
There is no evidence that it is all in our genes. The chimpanzees that have been studied literally live in a region that is a human war zone where there is constant human violence, including poaching. Those chimpanzees aren’t living under normal conditions, no more than were the violently apocalyptic Plains Indians who had formed new tribes after experiencing apocalypse of their traditional cultures. Besides, bonobos are more genetically similar to humans than are chimpanzees and they aren’t extremely violent, herarchical, or male-dominated.
Anthropology also shows that this thinking is false. Yes, humans are territorial, aggressive, and hierarchical when under extremely stressful conditions. But most of human evolution wasn’t under extremely stressful conditions. Before agriculture, starvation was rare because humans weren’t dependent on a single food source for survival throughout the rest of the year. And before empires, constant war was not the typical experience of most communities. The US has been at war almost ever year since the country was founded. If as an American you take that as normal, you are utterly disconnected from reality.
The challenge in understanding our inheritance of human nature is that we have annihilated (through disease, genocide, and forced assimilation) nearly every society that wasn’t territorial, aggressive, and hierarchical. In past millennia, there were probably millions of such small societies that existed all over the world. Even a few centuries ago after colonialism had begun, there were probably still hundreds of thousands of them surviving. That used to be the normal state of humanity. It’s not about romanticizing “primitive people”. They had problems as well, but they were simply different kinds of problems.
For far too long, The Democratic Party has favoured race and gender identification over income and cultural issues. More attention has been given to the “glass ceiling,” a vision open to relatively few women, than to the problems of family life for the millions who have to work to make ends meet and who cannot afford nannies and “enriched” day care. Affirmative action and related policies have led to many Black students enrolling in ethnically concentrated “studies” programs rather than science or engineering, where present and future jobs of lie.
Mr. Phillips might be correct in wanting the DNC to maintain its orientation toward reflecting the biases that led to the recent loss and to ignore the good fortune the party had with Obama runnibg against two unimpressive opponents. The BBC had interviews with Black voters who said that Obama was given a free ride by the back community despite his lack of serious, ongoing involvement with issues of poverty and education because of his skin colour. Too bad they didn’t look more deeply.
In addition, Mr. Phillips passes over the evidence that the DNC, under the “leadership” of that Clinton toady who helped HRC lose to Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, allocated funds in the last moments of the 2016 campaign to increasing the Black vote in states in the South in which she had very little chance of winning – and not to the states that were clearly marginal in the so-called “rust belt.”
JOBS MATTER!
Jobs matter. But jobs are merely indicative of even deeper issues about the entire social order. It’s not just a political party that is being challenged by demands for change.
http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/12/02/ethnic-diversity-harms-schools/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200311/racism-brings-brain-drain
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200311/racism-brings-brain-drain
http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/12/02/ethnic-diversity-harms-schools/
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/site/ataglance/2016/06/interracial-friendships.html
It’s strange how different environments create different ways of perceiving others and relating to others.
When I lived here in Iowa City when I was younger, from 3rd to 7th grade, some of my best friends were minorities. I had two Asian friends, one adopted by white parents and another with his birth parents. I also spent a lot of time with a black kid, also adopted by white parents. But I never thought of my friends as minorities. They were simply my friends.
Then we moved to South Carolina. The public schools I went to were about evenly split between black and white. I did hang out with black kids at school. I played lot of card games with black kids. And there were Hispanic kids on my soccer team. Plus, the jobs I worked (McDonald’s and Kmart) put me in close contact with people of other races.
Despite all the non-whites I knew, I never had a single close friend who wasn’t white, not that I ever had that many close friends. Even as certain aspects of life were desegregated, neighborhoods and churches remained segregated. In everyday life, the races were kept apart by an entrenched cultural divide. There was an unstated rule about mixing too much with those who were different from you.
In the Deep South, the same thing was true of class. The class divide was stark and people did not cross it. Families that could afford it almost always sent their kids to exclusive private schools that not only excluded most minorities but more importantly excluded poor people. That is entirely different from much of the Midwest, except for suburbia in places like Chicago. There are no exclusive private schools in Iowa City, even though there are some wealthy very wealthy people living here, such as having one of the highest concentrations of doctors in the country.
Thinking about that, I bet interracial relationships are a thousand times more common in the US than inter-class relationships. It’s true that the wealthiest people are disproportionately white and so often live in racially segregated communities, but more importantly the wealthiest people are segregated from everyone who isn’t also wealthy no matter their race. How often does Trump ever have to interact with a poor or even middle class white person? It’s probably rare.
Click to access 20080710_20031512racialdiversityreconsideredstanleyrothman.pdf
The thing is that promoting diversity actually promotes assimilation. It’s segregating people that maintains differences.
If you put diverse kids together generation after generation, they start dating each other and marrying each other. Each generation gets more mixed than the last until within a few generations a shared culture forms and everyone meets somewhere in the middle. If all ethnic whites had been kept segregated in American history, there would still be immense diversity of ethnic white cultures. It took generations of mixing up those ethnicities before a shared white identity formed.
It’s not diversity that scares right-wingers. It’s the fear that whites and minorities will assimilate with one another. They are defending racial purity which ironically is a defense of diversity. If blacks hadn’t been segregated by anti-miscegenation laws, sundown towns, redlining, etc, then blacks and whites would have naturally mixed up over time. It takes great effort to keep people from marrying and having kids with each other.
Even with all that systemic and insitutionalized racism, European and African genetics ended up getting quite mixed up. A surprising percentage of Southern whites have some African genetics. And of course many US blacks are as much or more genetically European than they are genetically African. That taboo knowledge scares the white supremacists because every so often one of them finds out they aren’t racially pure. That has happened to some white supremacist leaders and advocates who did genetic testing only to find out they had non-European ancestry, sometimes even African.
It’s funny that, even as I don’t care about such things, it turns out that I’m the perfect candidate for white purity. All of my genetics apparently is European in origin. And multiple lines of my ancestry have been in America since the colonial era, including some slaveholders and Indian fighters. I’m the living ideal of white purity. Yet it almost makes me sad that I don’t have any non-European ancestry, at least none that has been detected. I’d find it much more fascinating if I had some unusual ancestry to add some mystery to my genealogy. Instead, I’m a stereotypical white of the American mutt variety.
I’m pro-miscegenation. Too much purity is a bad thing. Look at pure breed dogs with all their inbred health problems.
I think it’s due to insecurity of white recessive features like light eyes and hair and even skin. Every group has recessive features (Asian eyes, hair texture, facial shape can be recessive) but light eyes and hair are uniqueish to whites so much that even whites who are Mediterranean or even Slavic can lack them
There are also recessive features that cross ethnic/racial populations. Why are some recessive features obsessed over and others ignored? Even among Europeans, some recessive features are favored over others. But why? Why is it better to have blonde hair and blue eyes than to have red hair and green eyes?
https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent/uuid:0fb6280f-d78e-475a-800b-a1d6028c48f4
Click to access depletion_JPSP05.pdf
It’s too bad there isn’t more research on different kinds of populations. What is bullying and interracial interactions in low inequality societies, non-capitalist societies, hunter-gatherer societies, etc?
Everett brought his family with him, including his kids, when he studied the Piraha. The Piraha aren’t known for aggressive behavior and I doubt Everett’s kids were bullied simply for being different. If that is true, why doesn’t diversity cause the same kind of problems among the Piraha who are low inequality, non-capitalist hunter-gatherers?
Some other tribes in the same region as the Piraha are very violent. Why is that? It’s the same basic environment. Does culture have that much influence on human behavior, even when all other conditions are the same or similar? If that is true, what causes different cultures to develop?
So that study says the diverse schools have more bullying but not more interracial bullying
So… white kids are more likely to bully white kids in diverse schools and same with other races? What
Yeah. I read that. I was thinking more generally. I was putting it into the context of our lacking enough diversity in research about diversity. To bring it back to that study, when Everett brought his kids to live among the Piraha, did the Piraha children start bullying each other more? If not, it would be important to know why cultural or other environmental factors are involved.
There are several Piraha tribes and some of them originally were separate tribes who had taken on Piraha culture, not unlike how many Native American tribes took on the Shawnee culture. So, these seemingly homogeneous tribes are actually built on centuries of assimilation of diversity. Why are some cultures better at dealing with diversity than others?
Dude has issues
http://www.unz.com/isteve/will-classy-european-american-replace-downscale-white/
That is so pathetic that it is amusing. If there was just a better way to package ignorant bigotry, then suddenly history would reverse itself and old school ignorant bigotry would once again dominate the Western world.
What exactly s the plan? Rebuild the old ethno-nationalist empires? Conquer all the non-whites again while colonizing and genociding the natives, just like the good ol’ days?
That is how whiteness was created the first time around. There is no way to create vast racial categories like that and enforce them on large populations without mass violence, oppression, and terrorism. The racial order was always an imperial project and it can’t ever be anything else.
Click to access PifferIntelligence2015.pdf
Why is Nigeria an outlier?and the only African country?
Click to access Way(2010)SCAN.pdf
https://www.google.com/amp/s/topseudoscience.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/the-forbidden-paper-on-the-population-genetics-of-iq/amp/
The Piffer paper doesn’t even mention epigenetics, nutrition, or parasite load. All of those are known confounding factors. It isn’t only that they were not controlled for. They weren’t even considered, even though they are known factors in human development, especially the latter two in neurocognitive development.
As for epigenetics, it determines which genes are and are not expressed along with, if they are expressed, how they are expressed. We know little about epigenetics at present, but it seems highly probable that it would also determine how genes interact and conjointly express or not.
BTW why did Piffer use whites in Utah to stand in for all American whites. I can guarantee you that Utah whites are not even close to being representative. It’s interesting that he didn’t use whites from Tennessee or West Virginia. Also, why would he think that self-selected immigrant populations such as Mexicans in Los Angeles would be representative of the entire Mexican population. That is a plain ignorant assumption that is patently false.
Such low quality research always pisses me off. No useful conclusions can be based on it. At best, it is simply preliminary research to show researchers which mistakes to be avoided in future research.
The Way and Lieberman paper also talks little about controls of confounding factors. Epigentics isn’t mentioned at all.
When are researchers like this going to get serious about actually understanding what is going on? But first they’d have to admit their vast ignorance before any attempt at getting beyond that ignorance. There is nothing wrong with being ignorant, as we are all ignorant about such things for we simply lack much knowledge at present. Shouldn’t we at least with honesty and humility acknowledge this ignorance?
Pathetic
http://www.vdare.com/articles/jared-taylors-white-identity-whats-in-it-for-jews
Just reading the title is enough for me. I can’t stop myself from laughing. That is pure silliness. I don’t even need to read the article. LOL
You know alt righters compare European vs “third world” immigrants…
But when mass European immigration was happening, the Europe they were coming from was definitely third world by modern standards, in many ways even worse off than modern third world. The USA has always been receiving the poor impoverished masses frankly. If anything current American immigration which is not nearly as large as past American immigration tend to be s bit better off.
The average non-European immigrant today is of a far superior quality (in terms of wealth, IQ, education, professional training, violent crime rate, etc) than that of the average European immigrant for the first several centuries of American history (and, of course, far above the average US-born citizen). There is no possible way to doubt that obvious fact.
The average non-European immigrant today even has better English-speaking skills than the average European immigrant of the past. I bet they are also more likely to be Protestant (not Islamic, Catholic, Anabaptist, Pietist, Quaker, or anything else) than either the average European immigrant of the past or the average European immigrant of the present.
Immigration right now is one of the main factors keeping this country afloat, as they are bringing in wealth and skills along with raising the national average IQ. If anyone is serious about making America great again, well what originally made it great to the extent if ever was great was wave after wave of mass immigration across the centuries. And the vast majority of it has not been WASPs. The only thing that has changed is that we’ve increased the quality of immigrant since letting in more non-Europeans.
The real problem, if we are to complain, is that this creates a brain drain in the home countries of these immigrants. We are taking the best from these countries and giving them nothing in return, except to occasionally bomb and invade them, overthrow their governments and terrorize their populations. Or else we simply shaft them with neocolonial exploitation and neoliberal globalization. It would be better for all involved if we didn’t fuck over these countries so badly that the best of the best among their citizens didn’t feel the need to escape.
Some Chinese I know see Indians and middle eastern people as white. I think they see people who aren’t black or East/southeast Asian as white lol.
My mom thinks they’re “dark white people.” I think it’s because Indians and Middle Easterners still have more “caucasoid” facial features.
If you look at the side by side photos the guys do look alike, besides color. A lot of Indians with albinism just look like Europeans
http://fox4kc.com/2017/02/23/austins-shooting-victim-who-stepped-in-to-stop-possible-hate-crime-we-are-all-humans/
They are white according to one of the earliest definitions. Indians and Middle Easterners are part of the so-called Caucasian population. They are neither Asians nor Africans. They are Caucasians. There was a famous case from earlier last century.
An Arab guy who immigrated from North Africa was automatically labeled as Caucasian/white on the census because that was the definition used. He wanted to be labeled as black, for some reason. So, he sued for his right to identify as he chose and won the court case.
That Arab guy was probably a dark-skinned Caucasian, maybe similar to those from Southern Italy and Iberian Peninsula. To many American whites, he was obviously not what they considered black, as American blacks are mostly from West Africa. And so the only other option at the time was to check him off as Caucasian on the census.
I’m sure that is how many ethnic whites were considered in the past, “dark white people” or otherwise somehow slightly off-white. Many Southern Europeans have more genetically in common with Arabs, Persians, and Indians than they have genetically in common with Scandinavians, Finnish, Sami, Germans, and Russians. But they are all part of related waves of early human immigration that passed through the Levant.
Persians, in particular, look more stereotypically white. My cousin married a princess of the former Iranian royal family. She (along with their children) looks fairly white, except having dark hair, but many white people have dark hair. My grandfather of mostly German ancestry had dark black hair.
Nice article, by the way. That guy’s sentiments are in line with my own thinking. What always shocks me is that more people don’t think like this. If anyone had the opportunity to save lives, why wouldn’t they? Why do we treat this as almost bizarre, one human saving the lives of other humans?
“I’ve been hearing people call me a hero and it’s not like that, I was just doing what anyone should have done for another human being. It’s not about where he was from or his ethnicity, we are all humans.”
http://archive.is/DBWe7
Nazism, forced expulsions, genocide, all of this insanity is NEVER going to appeal to Americans. It will NEVER HAPPEN, and even if this is morally acceptable to you (I pity whoever feels this way) it is the pinnacle of autistic retardation to un-ironically push this. Your white brothers and sisters will happily blow your heads off en masse to fight against this, even if it means living in a Brazilified favela slum. Not to mention the demographic goose is cooked so you’ll never get the military or the cops on your side. Killing you will give righteous whites just as much meaning and purpose as all your Roman statues and Viking larping, and they will fade off into that good beige night with a smile on their face. I’d rather it not come to this and no sane person wants a race war, but you’re not helping. Your very existence is an indictment of the white race, and a drag on perpetuating the existence of our people and a future for white children.
So you want a white zion. Sounds all well and good but it’s not lost on anyone in the know that the Zionists got their Zion through a massive violent ethnic cleansing (that continues to this day). Can you really blame non-whites, or normal whites for that matter, for vehemently opposing the mere suggestion of this, even in implication? For non psychotic ideologues, the how is just as important as the why, and from where I’m standing, the alt-right has done a piss poor job of clearly articulating what exactly is or is not off the table in relation to white advocacy, lending creedence to leftist attacks that this is all just crypto-nazism, if in fact this isn’t actually the case. I understand that this is a diverse movement without a set program, but paying glib lip-service to “peaceful means” in attaining a white ethnostate in North America where the U.S. already has a majority non-white birthrate is hardly convincing unless you have a very clearly articulated plan that absolutely excludes forcible removal or even extermination of undesirables. In this sense, leftist histrionics or even antifa hooliganism seems plausibly justified. It doesn’t help when Richard Spencer is shouting out “Hail Victory” (sieg hiel) and refusing to disavow Hitler, concerns about catering to leftist sensibilities and “punching right” nonwithstanding. I think you guys have really put the cart before the horse as it’s enough of a battle to fight for the legitimacy of white advocacy period, or to get some kind of immigration policy that’s not aggressively eliminating white majorities, without asking whites to sign up for creating some kind of atavistic valhalla on earth fantasy that would exclude or persecute legal citizens of their own countries based on their race, many of whom are their co-workers, friends, or family members.
Ok, got it, your only objection to mass racial genocide is strategic. Honest enough answer, but you are exactly the psychotic ideologue I’m talking about that will never appeal to anyone without severe psychological problems. Whites are hardly a monolithic group with weak ethnocentrism as it is, and a relative lack of racial minorities did not stop Europeans from slaughtering each other for thousands of years. The vast majority of modern whites would rather see pro-genocidal advocates of mass murder, like you, hang from lamposts, even if that means (gasp) living in proximity to brown people. Consider yourself lucky that you will always be too impotent to receive the fate that you would absolutely deserve if you ever had a chance to implement your plan.
“I thought that helped. It helped us signal to outsiders that we’re not going to disavow Hitler, punch right, or cater to leftist sensibilities. Considering how clear we were, I’m shocked that you’re even asking this.”
Hitler worshiping neo-nazis have been around since George Lincoln Rockwell. They have accomplished absolutely nothing besides acting as a cartoonish freakshow that the enemies of the white race have successfully used to demonize any advocacy for white interests or assertion of white identity. The alt-right, if anything, has arisen despite this.
As I see it, any political platform that has absolutely NOTHING to offer non-whites, people who care AT ALL about their fate, or the vast majority of Americans who strongly identify as such primarily, or at least in addition to their racial group, you are politically DEAD in the water. This leaves the alt-right to pursue three options: undemocratic minority apartheid rule, violent racial cleansing, or balkanization of the country. All I have to say is, good fucking luck with that. Getting whites a seat at the identity politics table, in which they will likely be the strongest voice, is totally doable… To dash this aside in favor of some quixotic quest to achieve racial purity is ghettoizing the movement and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. You simply will not win.
I hardly think pro-white advocacy is illegitimate, all other groups do it all the time. Difference is, your not going to sit in on an NAACP meeting and hear people talk about physically removing whites and instigating a race war. I don’t get why this is so hard to understand that this is a dead end…
To compare America to South Africa or Zimbabwe is way overblown, however. If you’re sucked in to the 24/7 outrage news cycle, you might think the sky is falling. I’ve lived in a multi-cultural area for over 10 years, including shitty neighborhoods, and the legitimate episodes of racial conflict I’ve seen I could count on one hand and have most of my fingers left over. People for the most part get along. There are ways to advocate for white interests, or fight to assure white homogeneity in certain areas of the U.S., without having to adopt an absolutely sociopathic orientation towards non-whites, in a way that might actually work and seem fair enough to the average person.
Lol, towelhead? Guess again fucknut. I call the creation of Israel a massive violent ethnic cleansing because it was, and is. This is more a statement of fact than a moral judgement. Is criticizing da jooz against alt-right p.c. now? Read a history book before you run your mouth. None of this means that the Palestinians are angels or any sane person would want to live there.
http://www.bionews.org.uk/page.asp?obj_id=380642
That seems rather sad and pointless. The underachievement in education of white working class children isn’t fundamentally different than the underachievement in education of non-white working class children. That is not about the United States, but I assume much of it is the same. The common factors for working class populations are:
legacies from epigenetics, poverty, malnutrition/undernourishment, food deserts, lack of family planning, lack of healthcare, lack of childcare, heavy metal toxicity, inadequate social safety net and public services, underfunded public education and public libraries, fewer parks and playgrounds and sports fields, less access to early childhood learning materials and high quality preschool, systemic and institutional class prejudices, stressful and traumatizing environments, being targeted by police and drug wars, general lack of opportunities and guidance and role models, etc.
If not precisely and carefully controlled for, all of those confounding factors will show up as part of the heritability rates. This isn’t exactly rocket science. There has already been approximately thousands of studies done on this kind of thing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10053977/The-Victorians-were-smarter-than-us-study-suggests.html
The idiocy of such articles about makes me want to permanently remove myself from the genetic pool by using drastic measures. Such ignorant simplemindedness about makes me lose all hope for humanity.
It is highly unlikely that this old data is reliable in the slightest or that the test subjects were representative of the population. And there is no way to confirm it by repeating the experiment with modern study designs and controls. It is entirely meaningless and anyone who treats it as meaningful is obviously not all that intelligent or else they are completely full of shit.
flintsparc • 4 years ago
Woodley, primary author of the paper, may be better known for his studies of Sea Serpent Taxonomy.
When he isn’t working on taxonomies of Sea Serpents for Crypto-zoology; he is trying to argue that race among humans constitute subspecies.
M A Woodley (2010) “Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications” Medical Hypotheses 74: 1. 195-201
Steve Dutch • 4 years ago
Well, one thing hasn’t changed. The use of superficial proxies for intelligence. Brain volume in the Victorian era, reflex time today, plus the old “the intelligent are being outbred” mantra.
nientecarpe • 4 years ago
“Dr Michael Woodley, who led the study published in the Intelligence journal
this month, identified the trend by comparing reaction times from trials
conducted by Victorian scientists against those carried out in recent
decades.”
i’m sure they had really precise chronometers in victorian times
Liz Mars • 4 years ago
Highly skeptical of this. I’m pissed there’s no link to the paper, and that the paper is unnamed. (Classy, Telegraph.) So I can’t tell if the following have been addressed. But I’m betting that at least one of the following has not:
–
Studies show intelligence is evenly distributed across the globe.
(I.e., Hitler was wrong.) 19th century reaction times were measured in
England. If ‘genetic intelligence’ (if that isn’t already a
tendentiously square circle) has been falling for 150 years, say, then
it would have had to have been falling in places that developed more
slowly, or might still be underdeveloped. It is unlikely that 9-to-5s
are creating measurable evolutionary pressure in Sudan, for example, or
in Siberia. The only way this could be accommodated is if the English
started several IQ points ahead — and now we’re just back to
old-fashioned euro-jingoism. Racism 2.0!
working memory, and this latter does directly and measurably impact IQ.
What is more likely: We’ve been getting dumber, or that fewer of us are
(say) being worked to death in a ‘manufactory house’?
And for the same reason: accurate measurement is hard. Much of the
precision we take for granted these days is an artefact of technology
that was not yet available in the 19th century. For example, there is no
problem these days with chronometric variation – because we’ve got
atomic clocks somewhere upstream to sync against. But back 150 years
ago, it would all have been astronomy and agreeance with other
timepieces. Recall that a mechanical watch will tell time differently at
different altitudes, in different humidities, and different levels of
winding (they run slightly faster on a full spring.) There are enough
problems with the tools that would have been available to gather data to
throw suspicion on the data itself.
BenTheGuy • 4 years ago
Didn’t I see this covered in the movie Idiocracy?
But did the Victorians really achieve more than us? I have this tiny computer I carry in my pocket that lets me communicate with pretty much anyone in the world. The Victorians couldn’t accomplish that.
jerseyjoe • 4 years ago
It could be that the Victorians only conducted tests on the ‘learned’ members of society, and ignored the bottom of the heap, hence skewing their results.
beatonthedonis • 4 years ago
Scientific researchers certainly appear to have become less intelligent.
Dr Mengele would be proud of this hogwash.
exodus20v4v5 • 4 years ago
Dr Michael Woodley your theory is absolute claptrap and no wonder Britain is in the mess it is .
Why does the Telegraph permit such trash opinions into print?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/
Maybe I’m more well informed about this topic than the author of this article. All of this seems obvious to the point of common sense. I’d be shocked if the researchers got different results.
To be fair, this article is several years old. But I thought the powerful relationship between genes and environment has been known for quite a while now.
The Irish and Italian immigrants assimilated through years of enclaves… 4 to 5 generations. Today we still have proud Irish and Italian Americans, waving the flag.
It takes time, a lot of times discordant assimilation (like your parents speak Spanish, you only speak English) leads to the kid falling into psychological disorganization that leads to low achievement.
Like the parents cannot impart their moral lessons from the old country – but they don’t let comprehend the new country. So the kid becomes some gangster… like the first generation of Gangs of New York.
There aren’t many European ethnic enclaves remaining or many ethnically pure descendants of European ethnic immigrants. Most of them left their ethnic enclaves generations ago and have spent much of the time mixing it up in suburbia.
There aren’t too many Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans around who both know their ancestry and care enough about it to feel anything beyond maybe mild curiosity, certainly not much flag-waving pride other than an occasional parade in certain big cities. The vast majority of Americans with ethnic ancestry have entirely forgotten what their ancestry is, unless they’ve done genealogical research. European ethnic cultures are almost entirely dead and gone in the US with only a few pockets remaining.
There are two problems with the last comment.
The waves of European immigrants from the middle 19th to early 20th century were severely impoverished, most of them some combination of former peasants and refugees. They were the dregs of European society, the most poor of the poor and the most desperate of the desperate. They showed up in a United States that was convulsing with conflict during the Gilded Age.
That is not the case today. Immigrants are less violent today and the entire country is less violent, as we live in one of the most peaceful eras in US history. Violent crime has been going down in most countries around the world for several decades now. Even among the war-torn countries, few of the refugees are ending up in the US. More of them end up in countries that are nearby. Immigrants these days that are able to travel as far as the United States tend to be from the middle-to-upper class.
The other thing is that much of that earlier violence didn’t come from immigrants. An initial rise of violence appeared among rural whites, partly because wide use of lead paint first began in rural areas for painting barns. As rural America emptied out, the cities took in large numbers of these former rural residents and violence shot up. Northern whites often feared Southern whites immigrating more than they worried about either European ethnics or blacks.
Southern whites were notorious for their violence and their having been Americanized for many generations didn’t make any difference, as their violence was purely of an American variety. The Scots-Irish, for example, have been known for their violence since the colonial era… and centuries later the regions they settled are still infamous for their rates of violence. Yet the residents in these regions are the most likely of any US citizens to simply identify as ‘American’. They are as American as they come and they are violent, their being no contradiction between those two things.
It is and always has been a violent country. Immigrants didn’t cause the US to become violent, unless you are talking about the immigrants from centuries past. Historical context is so important.
Also, why is it so rarely noted that some of the most homogeneously white parts of the country are also among the most violent? Neither minorities nor recent immigrants are causing whites in Appalachia and the rural South to be so violent.
Click to access Putnam.pdf
Putnam has some good research but he’s got this vein running through it lamenting a bygone era. Whenever I think of Putnam I think of Pleasantville (“Well we’re safe for now, thank goodness we’re in a bowling alley”).
Not many people who know American history can feel much nostalgia. Unless you were some combination of rich, white and male, it absolutely sucked for most Americans who lived at an earlier time. The only thing that sometimes made it seemed halfway decent for some people is that they were immigrants escaping even worse shit somewhere else.
Putnam rightly argues that culture of trust is important. Sure, slaves in their own way had immense culture of trust among themselves and formed close bonds of solidarity, which can be seen to this day with poor blacks having large social networks. But they were still slaves. Sure, poor rural whites in Appalachia probably had strong cultures of trust in centuries past. But that doesn’t change the fact that they lived in desperate poverty, barely above starvation and with extremely short lives.
Would anyone trade all the comforts, healthcare, social safety net, education, and lifespan of modern life in exchange for a culture of trust where you lived in uneducated ignorance, desperate poverty, and died young of some horribly painful disease without treatment? Culture of trust is a great thing, but certainly not the greatest of things. On the hierarchy of needs, many things are immensely more important and desirable for a happy and healthy life.
The problem for many Americans is that they are losing out in all ways. Not only do they have a loss of a culture of trust but also a loss of good jobs and destruction of community in being forced to move to look for good jobs that are ever harder to find. The loss of a culture of trust is as much or more a result than a cause. Culture of trust is simply an inevitable sacrifice of neoliberal globalization and corporatist capitalism. There is no way around this. If we want to save what is left of culture of trust and rebuild it, we have to deal with what has been destroying it.
Wut http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-18/democracy-god-thats-failing
Off topic but once my high school teacher made us take a political orientation test and I scored as libertarian.
Not much these days do I identify as that though. Im not sure. I want stronger social safety net, more efficient spending and use of tax dollars, I like oversight to correct for social injustices like environmental racism. Voted Bernie because inequality sucks, wage stagnation sucks, and greed is killing us.
But I am kind of a localist. I follow mainly local news and government these days because they have most impact on daily life. I’m in favor of strong local government and autonomy in that sense. Local autonomy, school autonomy, teacher autonomy. But I also support federal and even international oversight and standards. For many things like doctor, I support international standards. Especially so skilled immigrants like doctors can practice in their new countries. Federal standards are needed for protections of vulnerabilities to disadvantaged groups, environment, etc.
I have a non-authoritarian streak.
Government is not serving the people to me. I hate the increasing intrusion on civil liberties, the spying, and government harassment, im pro second amendment, etc.
It always irritates me when people call the US a failed democracy. A requirement of a democracy to be failing is first for it to have functioned. Democratic rhetoric isn’t the same thing as democratic reality. There has never been any point in American history where the majority of the population determined anything or when the ruling elite ever cared about what the majority believed, supported, or wanted.
If we lived in a functioning democracy, we’d now have a Sanders’ presidency. If that was the reality we were living in, then you could make an argument that Sanders represented a failure of that functioning democracy. But that isn’t the reality we are living in. Those who have seriously researched the matter have come to the conclusion that the US is an oligarchic banana republic (some give it other names: corporatism, inverted totatlitarianism, etc).
Still, I’ve always been reluctant to dismiss America’s democratic rhetoric. It does represent a real aspiration. Millions of Americans over several centuries have struggled, fought, and died for that democratic aspiration. I have no desire to dismiss the sacrifices they have made in the hope that one day we would become a functioning democracy. Let’s first get to a functioning democracy before declaring it a failure. Strangling the infant democracy in its crib is no heroic victory to be praised.
Is a child playing at doctor a failed doctor? No. It is only through play that the child dreams of what they might one day become as an adult. There is no point in judging a child for not yet being an adult. At least let the kid go off to medical school and then we’ll see what happens.
In terms of ideals, I’m a pro-democratic anti-authoritarian, a localist civil libertarian, and an Anti-Federalist (AKA a real Federalist). I favor social democracy, municipal socialism, anarchosyndicalism, and other similar systems. But I’m also non-dogmatic, an epistemological and ideological anarchist. I believe that what works for one set of people in a particular time, place, and situation may not work for another set of people in a different time, place, and situation. I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions.
So, my ideals are highly malleable. The only things I won’t budge on are compassion, honesty, and humility. Politics and governments should serve humans (all humans and all life, the entire biosphere), not the other way around.
I just believe your movement is a product of insecurity and fear rather than one based on a intellectual position. Most arguments are based on half truths and primitive feelings of superiority and prejudice which is a sign of inadequate education.
A sign of inadequate education, cognitive ability, intellectual insight, psychological development, moral capacity, and imaginative vision. Just all around basic inadequacy of all aspects of human worth and human potential.
“The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories.”
I’ve heard of that before. Thanks for reminding me of it. This is interesting in a number of ways. Different cultures lead not just to different ways of thinking but different values applied to thinking. It’s not that different people necessarily have different capacities. These Kpelle tribesmen were capable of thinking like a Westerner. They just didn’t value it. So, if simply given an intelligence test, they’d likely get low scores.
That is essentially what happened the first time with this test. Categorizing things is a fundamental aspect of intelligent tests because it indicates capacity for abstract thought (e.g., fluid intelligence). But these people didn’t lack the capacity for abstract thought. They simply didn’t value it because, in their society, such abstractions served no practical purpose and so were ‘foolish’.
There is no left/right divide anymore. The left/right divide was a workable political solution to the inherent antagonisms of the West’s state capitalist system (which is based upon a deeply held belief in a racial caste system).
But it’s not working anymore. We are witnessing the destruction of the old liberal democratic order (which embodied all of the left and all of the right together in a dialectical system), and is now breaking down as the antagonisms within capitalism and state power deepen, and the racial caste system is being exposed yet again.
That is similar to the view I’ve come to. The left and right, as has existed these past centuries, both were contained within the “old liberal democratic order” and the paradigm it was an expression of. Conservatism and liberalism, in the American sense, are simply two facets of the same thing.
They don’t fundamentally exist in opposition, as together they create and maintain the social order. That is an insight I’ve tried to gain deeper insight by way of my theorizing about symbolic conflation. It’s a question of what holds it all together that neither side is willing to confront for fear of undoing it.
“I got back from a month in China about two weeks ago.
I was more concerned about harassment and privacy violations from US Customs when I got back than I was about the Chinese authorities.
I’m Italian-american but look “ethnic” enough that I get a sizable amount of anti-Hispanic or anti-Arabic harassment and returning to “Trump’s America ®” was a genuine concern.”
I’m sure that is an experience many Americans are facing. Simply looking ethnic can make you a target of government attention and possibly make your life difficult. If this continues, the concerns will be far greater than mere inconvenience of being detained at an airport.
Well what are you doing? Don’t say activism because, like I said, it doesn’t really work anymore, certainly not towards fixing anything.
That’s my point. This isn’t the 60s, where movements required leaders and organizational structure to build and defend an authoritative brand through which they could deliver an authoritative message. Social media made activism easy, and this turned out to be a curse because it effectively stripped it of needing or even being able to form leaders and structure. Nowadays, activism brands are just hashtags, measured in value solely by how well they trend rather than their brand authority, but in the process anybody can take up that hashtag in the name of virtually anything until it quickly turns into a noisy but meaningless drone of dissent.
Remember Occupy? People talked at length about how energized and activated people were then too but it didn’t amount to jack shit. Remember their slogan? “What is our one demand?” To this day I genuinely do not know the answer to that question, and neither do you. Occupy fell down the same way all modern activism does – bleeding out into a senseless, droning background noise of “we’re angry” lost in the ocean of all the rest saying the same. That won’t fix anything, ever. And the worst of it is that modern activism is nicknamed “slacktivism” for a reason: even if it did work, and it doesn’t, it still ultimately amounts to complaining until somebody else fixes the problem for you, which is no substitute for fixing it yourself.
So, seriously, qualify yourself: who’s the “we in “we are trying pretty hard to fix this mess?” Who are you appointing yourself the ambassador of here, and what part do you personally play in whatever it is they’re actually doing to meet this goal that gives you the right to do so? Because it isn’t Americans as a whole. I’m absolutely fucking sick of American apologists at this point. I’ve been listening to Americans try to pardon their country’s ongoing decline since fucking 9/11 and, 15 years later, there’s been no sign whatsoever that “trying to fix things” has ever happened. Complaining about it, yes, we get a lot of that, but actual productive work that’s going to convert into some meaningful change for the things you’re trying to “fix?” We’re sick of hearing excuses, so pack them in and take some fucking ownership of what your country is doing.
The failure isn’t what anyone does or doesn’t do within the system. The failure is the system itself. And that failure is inevitable, as long as this system is maintained. So, it has to be decided: Which is more important, this failed system or trying something different?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40984548?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
That is about as unsurprising as can be found. In a society built on centuries of systemic and institutionalized racism, it is harder for ordinary people in that society (who inevitably internalize racial prejudices and conflicts, even if unconsciously) to maintain normal, healthy, close, and long-lasting relationships with those of other races. A society built on bad race relations doesn’t lead to good interracial relationships. How shocking! It reminds me of the research that found that severe poverty and long-term unemployment correlates to higher rates of theft.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/these-iowans-voted-for-trump-many-of-them-are-already-disappointed/2017/02/26/18f86b86-fa8d-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpiowa-719pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.90aee8970599
If she was as vulnerable to ‘witch hunts’ as you claim, it was criminally negligent of both Hillary Clinton and the party to allow her nomination. The sad reality is Hillary Clinton was the architect of her own defeat.
The idea Hillary Clinton was capable of defeating Donald Trump is a knee slapper because Hillary Clinton isn’t capable of running the all-inclusive, issues driven hands-on campaign required to defeat Trump. Clinton hates campaigning and suffers an extreme charisma deficit. Not the type of candidate who wins Miss Congeniality, which was a must in order to beat Trump.
The comedy of fatal errors began right out of the gate. Clinton framed the election as a personality contest between herself and Donald Trump. She promoted herself primarily as not Trump while neglecting to sell her own platform. Finally she ran a divisive campaign; her ‘deplorables’ speech sent the wrong talking points to her supporters while alienating the individuals whose votes she required for victory. This grievous insult was exacerbated by her failure to campaign in person in Michigan, Wisconsin – two states where she was defeated by Sanders, and Pennsylvania. These missteps cost her the Rust Belt, and the election.
The Democrats are, sadly, incapable of admitting the truth, which is not surprising considering they’ve spent the last 16 years blaming Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s similarly humiliating defeat in 2000, thus proving the adage that those who fail to understand history are condemned to repeat it.
It was that longer perspective that really pissed me off. The constant moral and political failure of Democrats was constantly being blamed on people who mostly weren’t Democrats. In Florida, more registered Democrats voted for Bush than voted for Nader. There was no way in which Nader was the deciding factor.
The closest to any full recounts that were done proved that Gore won that election, but then through bribery or threat threw the election by refusing to fight for his own victory. It’s because the establishment always defends its own, no matter the party. Establishment Democrats like Gore weren’t going to actually fight for democracy and fight to represent his supporters, if it meant fighting based on righteous principle against the establishment in the other party.
Then this election Democrats did everything to manipulate the election. Then they blamed voters once again for the Democratic establishment’s failure. It was the last straw. I will never forget nor forgive. They fucked up permanently this time. There in a hole of their own making and they continue to dig.
A lot of people forget that Ben Franklin considered all non-English Europeans to be of inferior racial quality, partially due to their “swarthiness of skin”. The only exception was the Saxons (aka Anglosaxon), which made up an exceedingly tiny portion of northern Germany.
He was actually more or less correct in his assessment of skin tone. People from the British Isles have the lightest skin in Europe on average.
Also worth mentioning is that Brits are not the blondest or bluest eyed Europeans, just the palest. Those distinctions belong to Scandinavians and northeast Europeans.
I was reading through old blog posts. I came across a detail about James Loewen’s research. He found that sundown towns didn’t only keep out blacks, along with other minorities. They also kept out ethnic whites. To this day, these former sundown towns (and sundown suburbs) are the most WASPish places in the country.
appearently British people being ugly is a stereotype (like the bad teeth one) though I haven’t heard it much. I’ve heard people say the British royal family is ugly (“they merry pretty commoners but it never seems to beautify their gene pool”) but that’s not really indicative of wasps on average
British royalty probably has more French Norman ancestry. But the average WASP is mostly Germanic and Scandinavian ancestry. Most of the royalty in Europe has had more genetically in common with each other than with their local populations.
Maybe inbreeding makes people uglier? lol
I thought of saying something about inbred royalty. The recent British royalty are wise for more often marrying outside of royalty, to diversify the genetics. But I’m not sure such royal outbreeding helps with their looks.