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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33993 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Putting aside I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes, even in more rural parts of the country. Ironically, many of the same people who put forth those population changes are now the ones scared of immigration, so in 50 years, as is American tradition, these Haitian immigrants will be saying we shouldn't be letting in the Bangladeshi's or whomever.

The various European groups that migrated to the US in the past were and are more similar to each other in terms of political views & shared cultural history than they are to the populations that arrived post WWII. Concluding that current migration is going to work out favorably from past European migrants being able to form a coherent new identity under vastly different socio-economic circumstances is a reach. From surveys like the GSS or others, it seems pretty likely that adding more migrants from places like Haiti, Central America or Africa isn't going to result in a smooth temporal continuity of extant American cultural sentiments about various things like immigration, free speech or the economy like you seem to imply.

As an aside, I remember reading a similar argument by you in the past, and sure enough going through my post history this turns out to be the third time I post this objection to the same kind of argument put forth by you. I don't expect you to concede, but given that you've never responded so far to me or others pointing out more or less the same thing, it'd be interesting to hear where you think this counterpoint goes wrong.

1.) If you would've told a British person they were basically the same as a Serb or Bulgarian in I don't know, 1851, they likely would've punched you and called you some weird slur nobody knows anymore. But, also, the whole "these ethnic groups are all similar too each other so that immigration was OK, it's just these people won't be able to do it," is literally the same argument made against Italians, Jews, Slavs, and hell, the Swedes at one time. This weird 'we're all white and should have solidarity' is a thing that never existed. As I've might've said before, as the descendent of Pole's, it's actually far more likely some ancestor of current non-college educated half-German guy in rural Ohio did a bit of light war crimes of ancestors of mine, as far as nothing bad has been done to my ancestors by non-European immigrants, so why should I, as argued below, have solidarity with them on racial lines?

2.) I'm quite sure the ole' American assimilation process (which continues largely the same way it always has despite protests to the contrary) will do it's work on Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and whomever else is the scary migrant group of the week. Yes, yes, the culture will change around that - welcome to being in the position of Bill the Butcher in 1863 upset the Irish were changing things or whatever. We're not some European country where people stay on the same patch of land for 9,000 generations. Things shift and change, and whatever you think was the perfect time that we globalists ruined was a time of ruin and destruction for some a generation or two older than you.

As far as imparting cultural sentiments, I don't know, Trump seems to be winning over Hispanic's fine. A little economic success leading to ladder pulling does not know color. It's an American tradition.

3.) Which is probably my inherent bedrock disagreement on where we don't agree - America's not getting worse to me. There are issues, as always, but in the long run, even with Trump, things continue to progress bit by bit.

I'm quite sure the ole' American assimilation process (which continues largely the same way it always has despite protests to the contrary)

Prior to the last few decades, assimilation resistance came from the minority.

Now it comes from the majority (or whatever we want to call the media blob that approximates the "majority" opinion regardless of what most people actually want), which is why people expect the process to not function like it did prior to Western liberalism's suicidal turn.

There is no such thing as assimilation resistance at least the way it actually matters in society, as opposed to being upset there's more aspects of cultural group x in American life. There's no evidence of the usual pattern changing - first gen speaking mother tongue, second gen speaking mixture, third gen speaking English and a little bit of the mother tongue, fourth gen not knowing the mother tongue. OK, the last part is a joke.

There is no such thing as assimilation resistance at least the way it actually matters in society, as opposed to being upset there's more aspects of cultural group x in American life.

What exactly do you think assimilation is? Do you think that if these immigrants continue all of their normal cultural practices, but do them in English, that should be good enough for us to stop complaining?

I mean, seemed to work out for Irish, Italians, Jews, and all the other formerly high-crime low-wage ethnic groups. Even among Hispanics, there's a rising tide of 3rd & 4th generation who are now very successful and just like the white ethnics are starting to vote on cultural grievance and status protection, just like Archie Bunker and such started to do so.

Outside of that, there's no evidence that sort of issues, say, Europe is having with it's immigrant population is happening in the US at any large scale in the long run. Sixth and seventh generation Algerians and Turk's aren't considered fully French or German, and this just isn't an issue in America, outside of a rump 30% of which there has always been a population that's been upset since we started letting those swarthy Swedes in.

Genetic similarity is pretty high, many Serbs can pass for Britons and vice versa. Not true for Haitians or Chinese etc. Cultural similarity is now much higher because modernity wiped it out during 20th century.

I'm quite sure the ole' American assimilation process (which continues largely the same way it always has despite protests to the contrary) will do it's work on Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and whomever else is the scary migrant group of the week

None of these people are, on average genetically on par with anglo-saxons, germanics or even balkan slavs, who are believed to be the dumbest Europeans there are, with the possible exception of southern Italians. I'm talking about stuff like propensity for violence, polygenic scores for educational attainment and so on.

If they were really on par, Salvador or Venezuela wouldn't look like Salvador or Venezuela, but would look like Australia.

Genetic similarity is pretty high, many Serbs can pass for Britons and vice versa.

Also, it was British colonists who came up with the legal concept of the white race in the late 17th Century. I'm pretty sure no Briton in the 19th Century would take serious offense at the argument that they have more racial similarity with Serbs and Bulgarians than with Haitian or South African blacks.

It’s entirely plausible that Hispanics with good nutrition have IQ’s similar to Balkaners.

Famous US joke is that when math departments are trying to fill their Hispanic quota, they look around for Argentinian Jews.

Hispanics span everyone from (Italian) Argentinians to 100% indigenous Mayans from Yucatan to Dominicans of mixed white, black and indigenous ancestry.

German ancestry Argentinians do not count for Hispanics for US purposes?

Genetic similarity is pretty high, many Serbs can pass for Britons and vice versa.

Denizens of autistic phenotype forums are screaming right now

What I meant is there exist a number of not really typical people in each population who wouldn't raise an eyebrow in either place.

Obviously you can tell at glance which group of tourists are from where, you can even tell Brits from Germans if you look carefully enough, but still, there are people who can pass in both places.

At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?

Sub-saharan African-immigrant populations are largely assimilating in terms of average outcomes of crime, educational attainment, and earning (see here) and appear to be mostly being dragged down on group averages by Somali immigrants specifically. Kenyan immigrants, for example, out-earn US-born citizens on average ($70,000/household vs. $66,000/household). Cameroonians and Liberians similarly have lower poverty rates than either the migrant population as a whole or native-born Americans (9% each vs. 14% of the immigrant population and 12% of the native-born population).

The repeated discussion of whether or not the native-born African American population is genetically distinct and disadvantaged from the general African population, that is the losers of a historical fitness competition, seems to gain another data point in its favor.

Though of course it's something of a folly to group together Somalis with Yoruba with Hausa with Ngala, it's at least a data point.

It seems pretty obvious that this is a selection effect and nothing more. If those Kenyan immigrants were representative of their home country, then Kenya would be a very wealthy country. You see a similar thing in the UK, with Nigerians (very selected) outperforming Jamaicans (unselected). The latter have outcomes that are pretty similar to African Americans.

Of course, if African migration to the US continues to be hyper-selective, then those migrants probably will end up with similar or better outcomes to the current Americans. But the group of Haitians in Springfield do not seem to have been selected for their high IQs (most of the Haitian elite left during the Duvalier dictatorship, as I understand it).

I'd be real interested in an answer here too. Modern American culture is completely built around overlooking and/or excusing the miserable abject failure of generations worth of attempted uplift of the black population. So much so that progressives like @Outlaw83 seem completely unaware that this failure is anything they could even possibly be asked to account for.

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