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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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As much as Americans kvetch about their black people, there really is no population over there that's really comparable to Gypsies.

It's an unfair over-generalisation to assume, without any other evidence (habitus, dress, accent, etc) that some individual black American person has a meaningfully higher chance of committing crime. But with Gypsies, man, it's an iron law, there's not even a question. A gypsy president, or for that matter gypsy lawyer or doctor or other middle-class type, is inconceivable.

I know an Irish traveller (not mixed) who has quit the culture and done very well for himself becoming a programmer, but yeah the generalisation is still a very accurate one.

Roma gypsies seem completely set in their ways while Irish traveller ways have changed quite a bit over the decades, the culture may have become even more criminal as a result (though maybe reading John B. Keane plays has given me a mistaken impression of how it was in the 50s), but change opens up the space for a few ambitious people to make it out.

Ah, the import of rap culture?

Nah they're not into rap music, mostly country. Though I am shocked at how much the local Nigerians are affected by UK drill culture, kids I went to school who seemed pretty normal suddenly picking up a London accent and trying to be gangsters before ending up in jail.

I wonder how Gypsies would do if they were all moved onto a planet of their own, with nobody except each other to victimize.

I don't wonder; I'm quite certain they'd all be dead in a decade, or whatever is the longest possible period you can run on predatory cannibalism.

While I have no fondness for gypsies, that kind of comment really doesn’t add anything to the discussion.

A gypsy president, or for that matter gypsy lawyer or doctor or other middle-class type, is inconceivable.

It's conceivable for mixed ancestry people, but you won't consider that person a gypsy. Moreover, that person will overwhelmingly likely not consider themselves a gypsy. Imagine someone from a mixed-race marriage saying, "Black? Fuck this ghetto shit, my mom's white, my dad hates his childhood in the hood, and has no love left for it, so I'm just American. All this racial heritage bullshit is just keeping people like me down."

This sounds like a direct description of Thomas Chatterton Williams (albeit taking a rough tone to his more genteel one), more or less. He describes himself as an "ex-black man", criticizes aspects of "ghetto" black culture, and encourages people to move towards a world beyond self-identification with racial categories.

Kmele Foster isn't from a mixed-race marriage, but he approaches things similarly.

In practice that person would be a professional conservative grifter because in all other circumstances identifying as black(but not actually being) is advantageous and this is recognized by nearly all functional people. Which is even more different from gypsies, aiui.

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