For whatever it's worth, historian Claire Rydell Arcenas persuasively argues in her book, "America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life", that Locke's association with the Founding is a modern myth, created by those who are now called Straussians during the Cold War to combat Marxist discourse. Whatever the case, questioning your own assumptions is often worthwhile. Albeit, probably disorienting too.
Interesting. I think the importance of "all men are created equal" to the founding is essentially nil. You remove it, everything else is the same. Montesquieu seems much more important in laying out "here's what was already done" and Iroquois Confederacy if anything might have been the template for the answer to "what next." But in the Declaration, "AMACE" was just part of some rather transparent geopolitical propaganda.
Lincoln tries to cement it in Gettysburg, but Lincoln's reign of Augustus ended with him and the country regressed to the intended design of small-f federalism, with Jim Crow nullifying 13A and 14A for the most part, so "AMACE" was irrelevant to national identity. So yes, I could see the whole idea of the country being founded on "AMACE" and/or Locke as not being a common belief until a post-New Deal (return of Federal dominance) retcon.
I try to avoid speaking in absolutes, but I can't help but notice that every time I see someone trying to tie racism in with libertarianism, they don't ever seem to address the arguments put forth by those of us that value liberty and see it (correctly) as the most efficient, productive, and the only moral way a society should run. Read Rothbard's Anatomy Of The State and For A New Liberty and then convince me he got it wrong somewhere.
Well, my issue with libertarianism (along with post-Reagan economic liberalism) is that it is typically utilitarianist, which I think interrupts and distorts understanding of why societies form states, and of how cultures should orient their values. So take "moral way a society should run" - societies aren't moral, and can't be, because by definition they must exclude rebels and pre-civilizational tribes or not exist. Morality therefore just becomes defined in distinction with what society has excluded. So it's like if I kill some guy named Bob and say "well it was the only anti-Bob thing to do." And then everyone starts to go around arguing about what is the most "anti-Bob" way to handle taxation. It's meaningless.
Morality is pretty straight forward. Don't hurt people and take their things. A society predicated on aggression, which is inherent in all state action, is immoral. You can get that from a religious perspective if you like, or from a secular perspective as laid out in something like Stephan Molyneux's book Universally Preferable Behavior. My reference to Molyneux, who happens to be one of those race and IQ guys, is purely coincidental. They don't get EVERYTHING wrong. In his case, his anti-state philosophy is sound.
"Don't hurt people and take their things" Why not? Modern American companies use university degrees to sort for new employees. Modern universities are soviet indoctrination factories. Why shouldn't a hypothetical drop-out who got in trouble for misgendering or whatever be justified in going up to any PMCs house and taking a toaster?
Libertarianism / blockchain take for granted the edifice of property that is in fact a structure of the "immoral, violent" immoral, violent state. Say some guy "owns" a mansion on blockchain in a society that no longer relies on police to uphold title. If he comes home and I am inside with a gun, he no longer owns anything except a token. All his stuff = mine and my fellow Mongol raiders.
This is the natural order. Things belong to those who take them. We don't see it because we live in states built first and foremost on upholding title. Unless you're in California, like me - the state has renounced that role, for the most part, and people can take what they want from you without consequence. It's not pleasant and the only thing holding off chaos is inertia plus 2A.
This issue you bring up has been addressed over and over by great libertarian minds. Seriously, go read the many books and articles on the subject. And the idea that the state upholds property rights by stealing your property in order to enforce property rights is laughable on its face. You won't be convinced by a reply from some rando in a Substack article, and it's possible nothing would convince you, but go read the writing of Mises.org, Rothbard, Walter Block, Robert P Murphy, and that way you can at least understand the arguments we're making.
But it does. I and anyone could band together and take whatever I want. Maybe the rest of society decides to just vote in an online pole for who gets the house, simply as an Instagram fad that spontaneously develops. If the vote is disagreed with by the "owner" then the "owner" is cancelled brutally.
Is the idea that the people who would take what they want in absence of the state are going to read a book why they shouldn't first, and this will magically keep the Hobbesian war of all against all at bay? Libertarians cannot reverse-define what life is like without leviathan. It was demonstrated and established. You can't change it with words. "Property rights" are an edifice of the state.
Ultimately everything the state does is downstream of property rights, though the specific manifestations are not predetermined. You can't make the state go away with words and books. That's just the exact same oxygen that determines what the state does downstream of property rights. You can only feed the reaction more air and it goes where it will go.
This is no criticism of you, so don't take it negatively but your objections have been made thousands of times by others and after many fruitless discussions online I can tell you that the libertarian philosophy can't be properly communicated in this form. I can tell you that every scenario you describe has been addressed and there are books on how these issues are resolved. And no, reading a book does not make the state go away. That isn't what I'm getting at. My point is only that it would take much more than a couple of paragraphs to convince someone that their worldview is incorrect. It didn't work that way for me and I can't see it working for someone like yourself either. It's a different path for everyone. For some it's listening to podcasts from people like Dave Smith on Part Of The Problem or Ron Paul's Liberty Report. For others it's reading books like these:
No matter my effort, I could not fill in the [blank] [blank] [blank].
Also, I was under the impression the strength of the IQ test was not at all a gauge for measuring intelligence, but rather how the citizens you want in your society can effectively answer your curated questions, and their answers only lend to rendering a guess at how well they will integrate into your already-determined algorithm of success. That is, they were one of the original woke culture interviews. So it was no big surprise when us minorities failed with vibrant, flying colors.
In NYC or the East Bay if the first two include Asian and Black (in either order) then several things can fit the third.
I don't think there is a "scientific" answer to the question of whether IQ tests work. I "feel" that the questions do measure intelligence (which would still leave scores higher than 145 as basically all the same), but then I have trouble understanding how group average scores for elite professions top out at such low numbers - meaning half of lawyers or whatever are under 120 or something like that, and 120 is *not* a good score if the test is actually measuring intelligence the way I think it is. So I must be wrong, and it is just a test of test-taking ability. But how is that not "intelligence" - what else do we mean with the word, in other words?
I think that the answer is that there is no such thing as 'general intelligence'. The test questions really do measure some things but the scoring lacks sufficient granularity to be useful. 'You aren't smart enough to be a lawyer because your 3d visualization skills aren't up to it.' or 'You'll make a great physicist you are so great at World History.'
The tests were flawed but should've been improved not scrapped. The forbidding of practical testing for employment makes the credentialism irresistible. Why is it that when I hire controls technicians that I can't have them wire up and program a Frequency Drive for part of their application process, but have to make sure that they sat in a classroom where Ohm's Law was taught?
I agree, insofar as the notion of adding granularity is a Sisyphean task. Like, just make the test a test of test-taking and stop there, actually is probably the best design. When I solve problems in real life I rely on the same practice in solving problems that I use in test taking. Calm down. Map the premises. Assume a solution exists. Find a way to force the solution.
1. that they are not tests of 'posing the problem'.
For any use case where the 'intelligence' needed is the ability to solve a pre-defined problem, or access a requested piece of information, the test should really at this point just be a test of using a computer. For most such use cases though, the needed skills are quickly and easily trainable and far more important are: can you show up on time consistently? and can you avoid offending my customers?
2. they are intended to be general rather than specific.
the demand for people with 'general intelligence' is really a cope because we are largely prohibited from checking for the specific intelligence that we need.
To quibble, there's some posing the problem inherent in solving a posed problem. That comes in with forcing a solution. "How do I mount something" becomes "how do I brace something" etc. You don't stop at the original formulation. And even in text-based tests that is a useful approach. I think one of the reasons IQ tests receive a bad reputation is because, as I said above, a lot of "high" scores are actually bad, in that as far as I can tell you have to be unable to problem-solve (and problem-pose) to get them.
Aug 15, 2023·edited Aug 15, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
I found mine to be a very subjective test. Who wrote "Faust"? I got it right, but clearly a biased question. Ask me the flag of Uganda. No idea. I was a Mensa member for years (hoping for career assisting connections). I found out that Mensa members are either 1) Jewish attorneys, who serve as Mensa secretaries to boost their resumes, 2) high functioning anti-social dweebs looking for a friend. There also was 3) an ubermensch group, wanting to hijack every picnic with their puzzles, and attaching whiskey-master personalities to those. Mensa Annual Meetings are legendary for their overconsumption of alcohol and being banned from future venues. The whole thing is a scam. I know more intelligent people who make themselves successful from nothing. And are happy to live with themselves.
I rarely see such blatant trivia questions. I've done four different online tests over the years, very narrow score range (four points) so pretty good reproducibility, stopped there because any more will be tainted by practice. Mostly it seems like the only problem in terms of substituting a skill for generic "intelligence" is the math stuff. But even on the tests with number series (which trip me up) I got the same scores, because it's all just calibrated to what people taking it get...
It wasn't an online test though. I spent 2 days doing various tests in the office of a career counselor, in an effort to find the right career path. Maybe the question was biased in my favor. Maybe an African-American would be asked a Maya Angelou question. Who really knows.
Certainly not in the US, no hope of it after 2020 if there was really any then. As I wrote yesterday I don't even think there will be many enclaves of homogeneity here outside of the ones already established in Cali. The only way other states can stop from becoming what California is is artificially limiting growth of cities. Otherwise, like here, rural/red Mazoozoo will all still have some land, somewhere, but they will be disenfranchised in their own states since urban votes overpower them.
Hm - I suppose I can't claim to know whether the rural vote is important anywhere (as opposed to red states being ruled from the suburbs). As for whether any of red California cares, probably - certainly on water policy there's a lot that would be different without the blue vote being dominant. (But I'm not farmer. Don't know what they even use the water for, cooling the chickens?)
I think I just have a mental graph of California leading me to false intuitions. Here, red California in absolute numbers is huge - so you could drop them into any other state and they would be dominant. But that doesn't mean that these giant rural majorities are getting their way in other states, I'm just projecting something unique about the disenfranchisement of red Cali based on seeing with my own eyes how many good-ol-boys are out here.
I liked Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals". He makes a case that ghetto culture, which most non-ghetto-culture types don't like very much, is just southern white trash culture that these poor people never got educated out of. It's a remnant of a trash culture from the borderlands of England/Scotland which died out two hundred years ago there, but still going strong here. He supports his claims.
You're welcome. I figure if I can't clarify a discussion I can always add to the confusion.
It's not. Speaking as heritage PWT(Poor White Trash) from Georgia I can assure that it is not. Now, the same thing that has created ghetto culture has created its analogue among the white trash. But the polygyny, the glamorization of vice(although trash whether black or white define vice differently than the elite ghetto culture consciously glories in vice), and other hallmarks of ghetto culture are not traditional to southern whites or blacks of the trash variety. It is an invasive species that came in with the drugs and the disposable fatherhood.
This is where I get suspicious of the honor culture theory. Like, did all the Blacks migrating to Detroit have to spend a summer on the Hatfield's Ranch on the way? Where did they find the hillbillies if not in the hills?
Aug 16, 2023·edited Aug 16, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
I suggest his book, once again.
And, one of my father's sisters married into white trash so I have cousins of that culture and their behavior, if observed in blacks, would fit the profile of ghetto.
What I am telling you is that that is not southern white trash culture. I appreciate that your cousins are 'wiggers' but I contrast that with a dataset assembled by being southern poor white trash for 40 years.
Sowell is a bright guy but left the south for NYC in 1939 when he was 9 and was already an AARP member before ghetto culture really reached the south. The 'quarters'- which is how the black sections of town were still known in '90s era southern small towns, yes it comes from slave quarters on plantations- had a culture not much like ghetto culture until the rise of Rap and Hip Hop.
Ghetto culture is not native to the South. Ask anyone who grew up here before the year 2000. It is an invasive species. Thus it is very common in say, Atlanta, among a population that is largely rootless and simply latches on to whatever is put before them and still largely unknown among say the Gullah's of the Georgia coast, who have known Georgia white trash as well as anybody for 300 years and still retain what you might call the heritage culture of the black of the American south.
He supports his claims with data. To much to put here, but I've checked his sources. You're free to draw a different conclusion that he does. But I think he's onto something.
Right, but I can go to the south, and did in my childhood and meet whites who are not manifesting Celtic diaspora honor culture. So one needs to explain why that culture osmosed to southern Blacks migrating to the north but failed to osmose to non-diaspora southern whites. There's a hole in the narrative. I think it's better to understand post-GM urban crime as a tragic outcome of (impossible) integration and deindustrialization. Non-WASP white European immigrant communities were assimilated out of their antagonistic position with American conformity, thanks to being able to "pass" and to factory jobs and upward mobility, didn't happen with GM Blacks.
Deindustrialization is a key point. In the poor south, industry was one of the principal 'bridges' for blacks to be able to rise above their externally depressed starting position. The meritocracy and egalitarianism of a factory certainly can have 'glass ceilings' but it provided a way for a lot of southern poor, both white and black, to rise above their beginnings.
But then what of my Irish obstinance and quick-tempered-ness? I didn't get it from the diaspora. I feel genes are a pretty OK explanation for that one. Otherwise I find the class explanation compelling; essentially agree that deindustrialization left large numbers of both races mired in an alienated role with what was left of the "economy" (soul-crushing retail jobs), it's just a question of more whites (proportionately and absolutely) having made it upward to the PMC class before the line was cut. But there's also intrinsic negative effects related to integration especially regarding grade school dynamics (the pressure not to "act white" in school only arises because of integration), and I think these might be the biggest downward weight of all.
While the Mazoozoo's of some generations (Boomer, X, Millenial) may have made it up into the PMC class before the line was cut, the latest statistics at the UC's indicate their children in Gen Z will not stay there. At least not in California where they have been "out competed" by the children of lower class immigrants.
"Lind is right that race-realism is not “scientific,” right that “scientific” race-realism is a dead end, wrong that race-realism is a dead end."
Acknowledging the existence of different breeds of humans isn't scientific?
"Telling right-wing donors and tech bros that the rich are genetically superior turns out to be an effective way to obtain gigs and grants."
Aaaaand there's the grift I was waiting for. I knew it was in there somewhere.
For whatever it's worth, historian Claire Rydell Arcenas persuasively argues in her book, "America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life", that Locke's association with the Founding is a modern myth, created by those who are now called Straussians during the Cold War to combat Marxist discourse. Whatever the case, questioning your own assumptions is often worthwhile. Albeit, probably disorienting too.
Interesting. I think the importance of "all men are created equal" to the founding is essentially nil. You remove it, everything else is the same. Montesquieu seems much more important in laying out "here's what was already done" and Iroquois Confederacy if anything might have been the template for the answer to "what next." But in the Declaration, "AMACE" was just part of some rather transparent geopolitical propaganda.
Lincoln tries to cement it in Gettysburg, but Lincoln's reign of Augustus ended with him and the country regressed to the intended design of small-f federalism, with Jim Crow nullifying 13A and 14A for the most part, so "AMACE" was irrelevant to national identity. So yes, I could see the whole idea of the country being founded on "AMACE" and/or Locke as not being a common belief until a post-New Deal (return of Federal dominance) retcon.
I try to avoid speaking in absolutes, but I can't help but notice that every time I see someone trying to tie racism in with libertarianism, they don't ever seem to address the arguments put forth by those of us that value liberty and see it (correctly) as the most efficient, productive, and the only moral way a society should run. Read Rothbard's Anatomy Of The State and For A New Liberty and then convince me he got it wrong somewhere.
Well, my issue with libertarianism (along with post-Reagan economic liberalism) is that it is typically utilitarianist, which I think interrupts and distorts understanding of why societies form states, and of how cultures should orient their values. So take "moral way a society should run" - societies aren't moral, and can't be, because by definition they must exclude rebels and pre-civilizational tribes or not exist. Morality therefore just becomes defined in distinction with what society has excluded. So it's like if I kill some guy named Bob and say "well it was the only anti-Bob thing to do." And then everyone starts to go around arguing about what is the most "anti-Bob" way to handle taxation. It's meaningless.
Morality is pretty straight forward. Don't hurt people and take their things. A society predicated on aggression, which is inherent in all state action, is immoral. You can get that from a religious perspective if you like, or from a secular perspective as laid out in something like Stephan Molyneux's book Universally Preferable Behavior. My reference to Molyneux, who happens to be one of those race and IQ guys, is purely coincidental. They don't get EVERYTHING wrong. In his case, his anti-state philosophy is sound.
"Don't hurt people and take their things" Why not? Modern American companies use university degrees to sort for new employees. Modern universities are soviet indoctrination factories. Why shouldn't a hypothetical drop-out who got in trouble for misgendering or whatever be justified in going up to any PMCs house and taking a toaster?
Libertarianism / blockchain take for granted the edifice of property that is in fact a structure of the "immoral, violent" immoral, violent state. Say some guy "owns" a mansion on blockchain in a society that no longer relies on police to uphold title. If he comes home and I am inside with a gun, he no longer owns anything except a token. All his stuff = mine and my fellow Mongol raiders.
This is the natural order. Things belong to those who take them. We don't see it because we live in states built first and foremost on upholding title. Unless you're in California, like me - the state has renounced that role, for the most part, and people can take what they want from you without consequence. It's not pleasant and the only thing holding off chaos is inertia plus 2A.
This issue you bring up has been addressed over and over by great libertarian minds. Seriously, go read the many books and articles on the subject. And the idea that the state upholds property rights by stealing your property in order to enforce property rights is laughable on its face. You won't be convinced by a reply from some rando in a Substack article, and it's possible nothing would convince you, but go read the writing of Mises.org, Rothbard, Walter Block, Robert P Murphy, and that way you can at least understand the arguments we're making.
But it does. I and anyone could band together and take whatever I want. Maybe the rest of society decides to just vote in an online pole for who gets the house, simply as an Instagram fad that spontaneously develops. If the vote is disagreed with by the "owner" then the "owner" is cancelled brutally.
Is the idea that the people who would take what they want in absence of the state are going to read a book why they shouldn't first, and this will magically keep the Hobbesian war of all against all at bay? Libertarians cannot reverse-define what life is like without leviathan. It was demonstrated and established. You can't change it with words. "Property rights" are an edifice of the state.
Ultimately everything the state does is downstream of property rights, though the specific manifestations are not predetermined. You can't make the state go away with words and books. That's just the exact same oxygen that determines what the state does downstream of property rights. You can only feed the reaction more air and it goes where it will go.
This is no criticism of you, so don't take it negatively but your objections have been made thousands of times by others and after many fruitless discussions online I can tell you that the libertarian philosophy can't be properly communicated in this form. I can tell you that every scenario you describe has been addressed and there are books on how these issues are resolved. And no, reading a book does not make the state go away. That isn't what I'm getting at. My point is only that it would take much more than a couple of paragraphs to convince someone that their worldview is incorrect. It didn't work that way for me and I can't see it working for someone like yourself either. It's a different path for everyone. For some it's listening to podcasts from people like Dave Smith on Part Of The Problem or Ron Paul's Liberty Report. For others it's reading books like these:
https://mises.org/library/chaos-theory-two-essays-market-anarchy-0
https://freedomain.com/freedomain_books/practical-anarchy/full-text/
No matter my effort, I could not fill in the [blank] [blank] [blank].
Also, I was under the impression the strength of the IQ test was not at all a gauge for measuring intelligence, but rather how the citizens you want in your society can effectively answer your curated questions, and their answers only lend to rendering a guess at how well they will integrate into your already-determined algorithm of success. That is, they were one of the original woke culture interviews. So it was no big surprise when us minorities failed with vibrant, flying colors.
In NYC or the East Bay if the first two include Asian and Black (in either order) then several things can fit the third.
I don't think there is a "scientific" answer to the question of whether IQ tests work. I "feel" that the questions do measure intelligence (which would still leave scores higher than 145 as basically all the same), but then I have trouble understanding how group average scores for elite professions top out at such low numbers - meaning half of lawyers or whatever are under 120 or something like that, and 120 is *not* a good score if the test is actually measuring intelligence the way I think it is. So I must be wrong, and it is just a test of test-taking ability. But how is that not "intelligence" - what else do we mean with the word, in other words?
I think that the answer is that there is no such thing as 'general intelligence'. The test questions really do measure some things but the scoring lacks sufficient granularity to be useful. 'You aren't smart enough to be a lawyer because your 3d visualization skills aren't up to it.' or 'You'll make a great physicist you are so great at World History.'
The tests were flawed but should've been improved not scrapped. The forbidding of practical testing for employment makes the credentialism irresistible. Why is it that when I hire controls technicians that I can't have them wire up and program a Frequency Drive for part of their application process, but have to make sure that they sat in a classroom where Ohm's Law was taught?
I agree, insofar as the notion of adding granularity is a Sisyphean task. Like, just make the test a test of test-taking and stop there, actually is probably the best design. When I solve problems in real life I rely on the same practice in solving problems that I use in test taking. Calm down. Map the premises. Assume a solution exists. Find a way to force the solution.
The two great problems with IQ tests is
1. that they are not tests of 'posing the problem'.
For any use case where the 'intelligence' needed is the ability to solve a pre-defined problem, or access a requested piece of information, the test should really at this point just be a test of using a computer. For most such use cases though, the needed skills are quickly and easily trainable and far more important are: can you show up on time consistently? and can you avoid offending my customers?
2. they are intended to be general rather than specific.
the demand for people with 'general intelligence' is really a cope because we are largely prohibited from checking for the specific intelligence that we need.
To quibble, there's some posing the problem inherent in solving a posed problem. That comes in with forcing a solution. "How do I mount something" becomes "how do I brace something" etc. You don't stop at the original formulation. And even in text-based tests that is a useful approach. I think one of the reasons IQ tests receive a bad reputation is because, as I said above, a lot of "high" scores are actually bad, in that as far as I can tell you have to be unable to problem-solve (and problem-pose) to get them.
I found mine to be a very subjective test. Who wrote "Faust"? I got it right, but clearly a biased question. Ask me the flag of Uganda. No idea. I was a Mensa member for years (hoping for career assisting connections). I found out that Mensa members are either 1) Jewish attorneys, who serve as Mensa secretaries to boost their resumes, 2) high functioning anti-social dweebs looking for a friend. There also was 3) an ubermensch group, wanting to hijack every picnic with their puzzles, and attaching whiskey-master personalities to those. Mensa Annual Meetings are legendary for their overconsumption of alcohol and being banned from future venues. The whole thing is a scam. I know more intelligent people who make themselves successful from nothing. And are happy to live with themselves.
I am 2) btw.
I rarely see such blatant trivia questions. I've done four different online tests over the years, very narrow score range (four points) so pretty good reproducibility, stopped there because any more will be tainted by practice. Mostly it seems like the only problem in terms of substituting a skill for generic "intelligence" is the math stuff. But even on the tests with number series (which trip me up) I got the same scores, because it's all just calibrated to what people taking it get...
It wasn't an online test though. I spent 2 days doing various tests in the office of a career counselor, in an effort to find the right career path. Maybe the question was biased in my favor. Maybe an African-American would be asked a Maya Angelou question. Who really knows.
Hopefully it just asks me to find my way around the Taco Bell menu.
Certainly not in the US, no hope of it after 2020 if there was really any then. As I wrote yesterday I don't even think there will be many enclaves of homogeneity here outside of the ones already established in Cali. The only way other states can stop from becoming what California is is artificially limiting growth of cities. Otherwise, like here, rural/red Mazoozoo will all still have some land, somewhere, but they will be disenfranchised in their own states since urban votes overpower them.
Hm - I suppose I can't claim to know whether the rural vote is important anywhere (as opposed to red states being ruled from the suburbs). As for whether any of red California cares, probably - certainly on water policy there's a lot that would be different without the blue vote being dominant. (But I'm not farmer. Don't know what they even use the water for, cooling the chickens?)
I think I just have a mental graph of California leading me to false intuitions. Here, red California in absolute numbers is huge - so you could drop them into any other state and they would be dominant. But that doesn't mean that these giant rural majorities are getting their way in other states, I'm just projecting something unique about the disenfranchisement of red Cali based on seeing with my own eyes how many good-ol-boys are out here.
Will the real Mazoozoos please stand up?
I liked Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals". He makes a case that ghetto culture, which most non-ghetto-culture types don't like very much, is just southern white trash culture that these poor people never got educated out of. It's a remnant of a trash culture from the borderlands of England/Scotland which died out two hundred years ago there, but still going strong here. He supports his claims.
You're welcome. I figure if I can't clarify a discussion I can always add to the confusion.
It's not. Speaking as heritage PWT(Poor White Trash) from Georgia I can assure that it is not. Now, the same thing that has created ghetto culture has created its analogue among the white trash. But the polygyny, the glamorization of vice(although trash whether black or white define vice differently than the elite ghetto culture consciously glories in vice), and other hallmarks of ghetto culture are not traditional to southern whites or blacks of the trash variety. It is an invasive species that came in with the drugs and the disposable fatherhood.
This is where I get suspicious of the honor culture theory. Like, did all the Blacks migrating to Detroit have to spend a summer on the Hatfield's Ranch on the way? Where did they find the hillbillies if not in the hills?
I suggest his book, once again.
And, one of my father's sisters married into white trash so I have cousins of that culture and their behavior, if observed in blacks, would fit the profile of ghetto.
What I am telling you is that that is not southern white trash culture. I appreciate that your cousins are 'wiggers' but I contrast that with a dataset assembled by being southern poor white trash for 40 years.
Sowell is a bright guy but left the south for NYC in 1939 when he was 9 and was already an AARP member before ghetto culture really reached the south. The 'quarters'- which is how the black sections of town were still known in '90s era southern small towns, yes it comes from slave quarters on plantations- had a culture not much like ghetto culture until the rise of Rap and Hip Hop.
Ghetto culture is not native to the South. Ask anyone who grew up here before the year 2000. It is an invasive species. Thus it is very common in say, Atlanta, among a population that is largely rootless and simply latches on to whatever is put before them and still largely unknown among say the Gullah's of the Georgia coast, who have known Georgia white trash as well as anybody for 300 years and still retain what you might call the heritage culture of the black of the American south.
He supports his claims with data. To much to put here, but I've checked his sources. You're free to draw a different conclusion that he does. But I think he's onto something.
Right, but I can go to the south, and did in my childhood and meet whites who are not manifesting Celtic diaspora honor culture. So one needs to explain why that culture osmosed to southern Blacks migrating to the north but failed to osmose to non-diaspora southern whites. There's a hole in the narrative. I think it's better to understand post-GM urban crime as a tragic outcome of (impossible) integration and deindustrialization. Non-WASP white European immigrant communities were assimilated out of their antagonistic position with American conformity, thanks to being able to "pass" and to factory jobs and upward mobility, didn't happen with GM Blacks.
Deindustrialization is a key point. In the poor south, industry was one of the principal 'bridges' for blacks to be able to rise above their externally depressed starting position. The meritocracy and egalitarianism of a factory certainly can have 'glass ceilings' but it provided a way for a lot of southern poor, both white and black, to rise above their beginnings.
What form of education did the borderers receive that was so successful in stamping out their culture?
But then what of my Irish obstinance and quick-tempered-ness? I didn't get it from the diaspora. I feel genes are a pretty OK explanation for that one. Otherwise I find the class explanation compelling; essentially agree that deindustrialization left large numbers of both races mired in an alienated role with what was left of the "economy" (soul-crushing retail jobs), it's just a question of more whites (proportionately and absolutely) having made it upward to the PMC class before the line was cut. But there's also intrinsic negative effects related to integration especially regarding grade school dynamics (the pressure not to "act white" in school only arises because of integration), and I think these might be the biggest downward weight of all.
While the Mazoozoo's of some generations (Boomer, X, Millenial) may have made it up into the PMC class before the line was cut, the latest statistics at the UC's indicate their children in Gen Z will not stay there. At least not in California where they have been "out competed" by the children of lower class immigrants.