The Fatal Culture of New Orleans
The breakdown of order in New Orleans has provided an open goal to those who make their coin slamming blacks.
Regular readers will know that I promised not to write about Steve Sailer again.
I lasted five weeks.
I did try. There should be a program.
Steve has a lengthy article on VDire today about how the suffering of New Orleans blacks is all down to blacks, and he just can’t resist mentioning IQ. A cursory examination of Steve’s career and practices; his authorship of potentially dishonest book reviews; calling himself the founder of an Institute which is nothing more than a jumped-up Yahoo! chatroom; failing to present his readers with all of the evidence on which he makes his claims; failing to respond to critics; and his consistent spitting on the grave of Stephen Jay Gould; all show that his oeuvre doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Sailer is a one-trick pony with an idea to sell, and it’s unfortunate that many in his target market, white males, are susceptible to his brainrot because they feel themselves to be excluded from their own society by the operation of ‘affirmative action’ and ‘positive discrimination’.
The piece is oddly reminiscent of the rhetoric employed by the Church of Scotland in 1923, when a report was presented to its General Assembly entitled ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality’. This is Steve Sailer in 2005:
“All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.”
This is the Church of Scotland in 1923:
“[But Catholic immigrant stock] cannot be assimilated and absorbed into theScottish race. They remain a people by themselves, segregated by reason of their race, their customs, their traditions and, above all, by their loyalty to their Church, and gradually and inevitably dividing Scotland racially, socially and ecclesiastically."
Now back to Steve in 2005–
“It also should have been expected that a large fraction of New Orleans's lower class blacks would not evacuate before a disaster. Many are too poor to own a car, or too untrustworthy to get a ride with neighbors, or too shortsighted to worry.”; and
“In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan—because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks.”
Now read what the Rev. Alan McDonald said about the 1923 report in 2002:
“Rev McDonald also read out part of a church and nation report which was presented to the General Assembly in 1923.
Entitled "The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality", he said that it accused the Irish Roman Catholic population of being part of a papist conspiracy to subvert Presbyterian values and of being the principal cause of drunkenness, crime and financial imprudence”.
Steve may be well ahead of the field on the so-called science of racial variation, but he’s missed the bus completely on the bigger issue of being a human being. As I’ve said elsewhere, for an ‘evolutionary conservative’ he is a poor excuse for a Darwinist. If he achieves his aim of breaking the taboos surrounding discussion of race and making the so-called science of racial variation a mainstream topic, then he will kill his own market niche. Instead of being one of one he will become one of many. In such a field only the fittest survive, and the ‘evolcon’ will be on his way to becoming an ‘extinct-o-con’.
If he’s interested in real intellectual exercise, he should perhaps ask himself this question, one which occurred to me in the aftermath of the London train bombings.
The London bombers were British born ethnic Asians and a Jamaican immigrant. Now, if by some quirk of fate the histories of Europe, Asia and Africa had developed on precisely the same lines as they did, but the peoples of Africa and Asia had evolved white skins and Caucasian features, and Europeans had developed what are now African and Asian features, would the threat of Islamist terrorism be any less deadly?
The answer to that question has to be no, for the development of the respective cultures in the same way and the operation of the same historical factors at the same time would still have ensured that there would be Islamist terrorists – they would just have white skins instead of brown or black.
Common culture is the juggernaut of motivations. It trumps skin tone every time. The same types of society develop the same types of culture regardless of whether the majority of the population is white, brown or yellow.
I might make myself unpopular in some circles for saying this, but if a similar kind of disaster afflicted the West of Scotland as has afflicted New Orleans, it would not at all be impossible to contemplate that similar scenes of absolute social breakdown would be observed here; and I could take Steve to any of our massive housing projects, Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Drumchapel and he would not see a black face in any of them. Some Glaswegians will tell anyone who will listen how frightened they are of the gangs.
The problems faced in these places are precisely those that seem to exist in New Orleans; long-term poverty and welfarism.
On his own blog, Sailer has made a joke of the high level of obesity in New Orleans. Referring to the reports of cannibalism circulated by Randall Robinson, he said “New Orleans has among the highest average obesity rates of any city in America, so I don't think they are quite at Donner Party straits yet”.
Yet obesity amongst the long-term poor is now so common that it should be a valid measure of poverty, if only because I have seen so many young women in Glasgow so heavy they can barely waddle.
All the social indicators for the west of Scotland are on the way down. Even life expectancy is lowering. Life expectancy for a male born in Glasgow in 2003 is now projected to be 11 years less than that of a male born in the same year in Dorset. It would be very interesting to see how New Orleans compares with Boca Raton or Santa Barbara in that regard.
It would also be very interesting to compare the comparative rates of infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, adult male unemployment, percentage of university students who fail to complete studies and levels of methadone prescription.
There are clearly chronic problems with poverty in both New Orleans and the west of Scotland. There is now little industry in the west of Scotland, and there seems to be little native industry in New Orleans, if Donna Tartt’s observation in today’s ‘Sunday Telegraph’ that ‘I don’t know how the tourist industry will weather this disaster, and tourism is the life’s blood of the area’ is anything to go by. Perhaps it’s evidence of Kelly’s Law of Tourism , that people who rely on tourism for their living are poor but might not know it, at work.
For the past 60 years in this country, and for a similar time in the USA, the poor have been bolstered by welfare. Being on welfare in the UK is hellish, as I can attest - £110 every two weeks buys you nothing, and that’s in a country where all healthcare is free at the point of use. One can understand why being poor in America is spoken of in such horrifying terms.
Last week, I linked to this article by Michael Barone called ‘Are classes back?’ The presence of social mobility in a society has always been a sign of health, for it then contains a middle class, the cement of all successful societies. In noting that social mobility in the UK and USA has declined, Barone doesn’t seem to think it’s altogether a bad thing if an America with less social mobility is one that is more meritocratic.
One is not sure how that argument would be received by those whose American Dreams ended up swamped by Lake Pontchartrain. Their only prospect of social mobility seems to be evacuation to Houston.
Barone doesn’t seem to appreciate that for many welfare recipients poverty is an hereditary feature, like squints. For many, once they’re off the ladder they stay off. Over time, what has been called ‘the dependency culture’ develops. People become accustomed to living as pensioners of the state. Some of their children move on, but most do not. And the cycle continues on and on.
Yet it is not hard to believe that perhaps some of the chaotic scenes at the Superdome were a consequence of having too many people who had lost their independence to welfare expecting that government would be there to provide a solution for them. If that was the case, it would be very sad, because those folks had faith in an institution which was doing nothing to help them; its ideology had forced it to stretch itself too thin.
If Hurricane Katrina brought the water into the city, then the dependency culture may have helped put panic on the streets. One had always thought welfare to be unconservative for no reason other than it sapped independence. Now we see it can kill you.
The economic reconstruction of Louisiana is clearly going to take a great deal more than just making things the way they were before. A far-sighted president would take this opportunity to turn a declining part of the country into an industrial centre, so that incomes will rise, there will be more incentive for families to stay together and not fall apart due to drug and alcohol abuse and that the whole region can effectively rejoin an America which has looked on while it slid further and further into poverty.
Regular readers will know that I promised not to write about Steve Sailer again.
I lasted five weeks.
I did try. There should be a program.
Steve has a lengthy article on VDire today about how the suffering of New Orleans blacks is all down to blacks, and he just can’t resist mentioning IQ. A cursory examination of Steve’s career and practices; his authorship of potentially dishonest book reviews; calling himself the founder of an Institute which is nothing more than a jumped-up Yahoo! chatroom; failing to present his readers with all of the evidence on which he makes his claims; failing to respond to critics; and his consistent spitting on the grave of Stephen Jay Gould; all show that his oeuvre doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Sailer is a one-trick pony with an idea to sell, and it’s unfortunate that many in his target market, white males, are susceptible to his brainrot because they feel themselves to be excluded from their own society by the operation of ‘affirmative action’ and ‘positive discrimination’.
The piece is oddly reminiscent of the rhetoric employed by the Church of Scotland in 1923, when a report was presented to its General Assembly entitled ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality’. This is Steve Sailer in 2005:
“All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.”
This is the Church of Scotland in 1923:
“[But Catholic immigrant stock] cannot be assimilated and absorbed into theScottish race. They remain a people by themselves, segregated by reason of their race, their customs, their traditions and, above all, by their loyalty to their Church, and gradually and inevitably dividing Scotland racially, socially and ecclesiastically."
Now back to Steve in 2005–
“It also should have been expected that a large fraction of New Orleans's lower class blacks would not evacuate before a disaster. Many are too poor to own a car, or too untrustworthy to get a ride with neighbors, or too shortsighted to worry.”; and
“In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan—because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks.”
Now read what the Rev. Alan McDonald said about the 1923 report in 2002:
“Rev McDonald also read out part of a church and nation report which was presented to the General Assembly in 1923.
Entitled "The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality", he said that it accused the Irish Roman Catholic population of being part of a papist conspiracy to subvert Presbyterian values and of being the principal cause of drunkenness, crime and financial imprudence”.
Steve may be well ahead of the field on the so-called science of racial variation, but he’s missed the bus completely on the bigger issue of being a human being. As I’ve said elsewhere, for an ‘evolutionary conservative’ he is a poor excuse for a Darwinist. If he achieves his aim of breaking the taboos surrounding discussion of race and making the so-called science of racial variation a mainstream topic, then he will kill his own market niche. Instead of being one of one he will become one of many. In such a field only the fittest survive, and the ‘evolcon’ will be on his way to becoming an ‘extinct-o-con’.
If he’s interested in real intellectual exercise, he should perhaps ask himself this question, one which occurred to me in the aftermath of the London train bombings.
The London bombers were British born ethnic Asians and a Jamaican immigrant. Now, if by some quirk of fate the histories of Europe, Asia and Africa had developed on precisely the same lines as they did, but the peoples of Africa and Asia had evolved white skins and Caucasian features, and Europeans had developed what are now African and Asian features, would the threat of Islamist terrorism be any less deadly?
The answer to that question has to be no, for the development of the respective cultures in the same way and the operation of the same historical factors at the same time would still have ensured that there would be Islamist terrorists – they would just have white skins instead of brown or black.
Common culture is the juggernaut of motivations. It trumps skin tone every time. The same types of society develop the same types of culture regardless of whether the majority of the population is white, brown or yellow.
I might make myself unpopular in some circles for saying this, but if a similar kind of disaster afflicted the West of Scotland as has afflicted New Orleans, it would not at all be impossible to contemplate that similar scenes of absolute social breakdown would be observed here; and I could take Steve to any of our massive housing projects, Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Drumchapel and he would not see a black face in any of them. Some Glaswegians will tell anyone who will listen how frightened they are of the gangs.
The problems faced in these places are precisely those that seem to exist in New Orleans; long-term poverty and welfarism.
On his own blog, Sailer has made a joke of the high level of obesity in New Orleans. Referring to the reports of cannibalism circulated by Randall Robinson, he said “New Orleans has among the highest average obesity rates of any city in America, so I don't think they are quite at Donner Party straits yet”.
Yet obesity amongst the long-term poor is now so common that it should be a valid measure of poverty, if only because I have seen so many young women in Glasgow so heavy they can barely waddle.
All the social indicators for the west of Scotland are on the way down. Even life expectancy is lowering. Life expectancy for a male born in Glasgow in 2003 is now projected to be 11 years less than that of a male born in the same year in Dorset. It would be very interesting to see how New Orleans compares with Boca Raton or Santa Barbara in that regard.
It would also be very interesting to compare the comparative rates of infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, adult male unemployment, percentage of university students who fail to complete studies and levels of methadone prescription.
There are clearly chronic problems with poverty in both New Orleans and the west of Scotland. There is now little industry in the west of Scotland, and there seems to be little native industry in New Orleans, if Donna Tartt’s observation in today’s ‘Sunday Telegraph’ that ‘I don’t know how the tourist industry will weather this disaster, and tourism is the life’s blood of the area’ is anything to go by. Perhaps it’s evidence of Kelly’s Law of Tourism , that people who rely on tourism for their living are poor but might not know it, at work.
For the past 60 years in this country, and for a similar time in the USA, the poor have been bolstered by welfare. Being on welfare in the UK is hellish, as I can attest - £110 every two weeks buys you nothing, and that’s in a country where all healthcare is free at the point of use. One can understand why being poor in America is spoken of in such horrifying terms.
Last week, I linked to this article by Michael Barone called ‘Are classes back?’ The presence of social mobility in a society has always been a sign of health, for it then contains a middle class, the cement of all successful societies. In noting that social mobility in the UK and USA has declined, Barone doesn’t seem to think it’s altogether a bad thing if an America with less social mobility is one that is more meritocratic.
One is not sure how that argument would be received by those whose American Dreams ended up swamped by Lake Pontchartrain. Their only prospect of social mobility seems to be evacuation to Houston.
Barone doesn’t seem to appreciate that for many welfare recipients poverty is an hereditary feature, like squints. For many, once they’re off the ladder they stay off. Over time, what has been called ‘the dependency culture’ develops. People become accustomed to living as pensioners of the state. Some of their children move on, but most do not. And the cycle continues on and on.
Yet it is not hard to believe that perhaps some of the chaotic scenes at the Superdome were a consequence of having too many people who had lost their independence to welfare expecting that government would be there to provide a solution for them. If that was the case, it would be very sad, because those folks had faith in an institution which was doing nothing to help them; its ideology had forced it to stretch itself too thin.
If Hurricane Katrina brought the water into the city, then the dependency culture may have helped put panic on the streets. One had always thought welfare to be unconservative for no reason other than it sapped independence. Now we see it can kill you.
The economic reconstruction of Louisiana is clearly going to take a great deal more than just making things the way they were before. A far-sighted president would take this opportunity to turn a declining part of the country into an industrial centre, so that incomes will rise, there will be more incentive for families to stay together and not fall apart due to drug and alcohol abuse and that the whole region can effectively rejoin an America which has looked on while it slid further and further into poverty.
Does America have such a far-sighted President?
posted by Martin at 9:47 PM
1 Comments:
Take a look at this post about Sailer - the Asian Supremacist.
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