https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1FO9MqWugY
1) This is semantics. Of course everyone knows that there are legal differences between chattel slavery and indentured servitude, but that the de facto condition is more or less the same. Starting off right away with a pedantic nitpick and playing it up as a big gotcha is a bad start.
2) True enough. Is that really a myth?
3) See #1. This is another attempt to split hairs between chattel slavery and serfdom.
4) This misses all kinds of things, particularly about how a) there were riots in NYC after the Emancipation Proclamation, because people had felt duped into fighting the Civil War over slavery, b) there were massive amounts of desertions of Union troops after the Emancipation Proclamation for the same reason, and people were not willing to die for "the cause of the Negro," and c) journalists at the time; from the North, otherwise more or less sympathetic to Lincoln, were pretty united in their condemnation of the Emancipation Proclamation as nothing but a cynical move that had no actual effect, since it only freed the slaves in the territories that the Union didn't control and therefore had no authority over.
5) It was a minor issue. He's totally wrong. Mentioning slavery doesn't mean that slavery especially in the context of the South being "slave states" was the most important factor, merely that it was a convenient label that was in common usage at the time. And Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist either, when elected. Curiously, Jefferson Davis was more interested in the eventual dissolution of the institution of slavery than Lincoln was. Don't "watch his other video" if you want more info. Read one of Thomas DiLorenzo's books instead (or even his contributed chapters in Reassessing the Presidency.) The real cause of the Civil War was economic Imperialism by the North, who had always seen the South as an area to be exploited by the North.
6) He doesn't even get the fact that there were two Souths; the Deep South, Gone with the Wind plantation south, and the backwoods Dukes of Hazzard South. There is no doubt that slavery was an important economic component of the plantation south, which made it just as vulnerable and subject to eventual toppling as the Roman Empire was, which was much more dependent on slave labor than the South ever was. Also, the 36% number is flat out wrong. In the 1850 census, there were 350,000 slave owners. That's less than 5%. Now; granted, there were extended families included in the census that weren't slave-owners but which were dependent on the economics of slavery. Maybe that's where he's getting his number? Mine is from the actual census, as pointed out by Dr. John Hope Franklin in his book From Slavery to Freedom (1994). His is based on some kind of voodoo mathematics.
7) This is also splitting hairs by making a big deal about alleged differences. Saying that a worker could charge or sue his employers when he would then have no employment and would starve is absurd.
8) Again; read DeLorenzo. There are all kinds of records that he apparently doesn't know about. Few blacks in the South actually wanted freedom. This shouldn't be surprising, really. Few Americans of any color today want freedom either, and we've eagerly embraced the gradual socialization and removal of our rights as we approach slavery ourselves. Remember; Limhi's people thought that the Lamanites taking half of their wealth as tribute was "grievous to be born"—and yet the actual tax rate once you account for all taxes that we pay (including "invisible" taxes that are baked into the cost of what we buy) are about that same rate in America today. We are in bondage as surely as Limhi's people are, and to masters who are much more hostile to our well-being than the slave owners of the South were to the blacks.
9) Has yet to recover economically? Good grief. It never will recover, because west Africa is filled with Africans. The average IQ in west African sub-Saharan countries is in the 60s and 70s with the lowest average IQ country in the world smack dab in the middle of this area, Equatorial Guinea, with an average IQ of 59. That's the average for the entire country, and it's functionally retarded from the perspective of a Western European (or European Diaspora) nation. In fact, every sub-Saharan African country, and most Third World countries in general have average IQs that would have been classified as "borderline deficient" (70-80) or "definite feeble-mindedness" (69 or below) according to classifications that were purged due to political correctness, but which were nonetheless accurate. In fact, the most functional of Third World countries (China excepted—although there are numerous reasons to believe that the Chinese average IQ is significantly overstated for both methodological and political reasons) are still within the realm of "dullness" (80-90). Rather; slavery was an opportunity for the above average elite caste of West Africa to profit from their neighbors, and given that they were both a) very tribal, and b) very r-selected, without any kind of Christian moral foundation to check their worst impulses, they saw no reason whatsoever not to sell the slaves that they already had anyway to European traders.
10) This is semantic word-games too. Of course slavery isn't "ended" globally; because white countries only had the legal jurisdiction to end slavery within their own countries. This point is, in fact, quite stupid, and meant as a gotcha; he agrees with it even as he disputes it by redefining the context to mean something other than what it actually means.
Anyway, this is hardly meant to be an apologetic of slavery. The desire for cheap labor in America, whether slaves, serfs, indentured servants, or imported scabs that can be paid much less than market labor rates has been the poison that will kill America slowly over time. We never should have brought slaves to America, and if our ancestors did so, then they should have been returned or set up somewhere else other than in America, as Lincoln himself believed was necessary for peaceful coexistence. He turned out to have been completely right on that one, at least. The elite plantation owners are little better than the elite CEO caste who throws Americans under the bus for H1-B visas, outsourcing and illegal alien labor; both are equally sociopathic, exploiting others to enrich themselves while looting the commonwealth.
But the youtube guy is right about one thing; most people don't understand the history of slavery, and have tried to appropriate it through historical revisionism to create a victim narrative by which to blackmail their political enemies into paying victimgeld of some kind or another.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Some More great Unz articles
Archived, so I can find them more easily again.
http://www.unz.com/article/jewish-politics-in-america-a-post-political-view/
http://www.unz.com/runz/racial-politics-in-america-and-in-california/
http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/israel-wins-2018-election/
http://www.unz.com/proberts/why-white-gentiles-cant-get-admission-to-ivy-league-universities/
http://www.unz.com/proberts/a-civil-war-lesson-for-the-uneducated/
There's especially a lot in the last article, small though it is. Or rather, there's a lot more on that topic than the last article has, although there's some pretty good links within the article itself. As an ethnic Southerner myself, I grow extremely tired of the slander and hatred poured upon the South, where we are cast as the eternal villains and the Original Sin of America, which justifies the continued oppression of our people, our culture, our traditions, our iconography and symbols, and indeed, the replacement of us in our own homelands. The lies and slander about the South and Southerners is hardly new; it started before the Civil War even happened, but it was tempered by at least some common sense. I mean, when I was a kid, it was still possible for The Dukes of Hazzard to not only be made, but even to be a huge, nationwide hit.
Almost nothing about what people "know" about the Civil War is really true. Especially the notion that the Confederacy was the American equivalent of Nazi Germany.
For that matter, Nazi Germany wasn't even what Nazi Germany is believed to be either.
http://flippingfetchingfiddledeedee.blogspot.com/2018/10/ron-unz-on-jews.html
And not Ron Unz, but another Jewish "defector" telling America what's really going on.
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/israel/freedman.htm
http://www.unz.com/article/jewish-politics-in-america-a-post-political-view/
http://www.unz.com/runz/racial-politics-in-america-and-in-california/
http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/israel-wins-2018-election/
http://www.unz.com/proberts/why-white-gentiles-cant-get-admission-to-ivy-league-universities/
http://www.unz.com/proberts/a-civil-war-lesson-for-the-uneducated/
There's especially a lot in the last article, small though it is. Or rather, there's a lot more on that topic than the last article has, although there's some pretty good links within the article itself. As an ethnic Southerner myself, I grow extremely tired of the slander and hatred poured upon the South, where we are cast as the eternal villains and the Original Sin of America, which justifies the continued oppression of our people, our culture, our traditions, our iconography and symbols, and indeed, the replacement of us in our own homelands. The lies and slander about the South and Southerners is hardly new; it started before the Civil War even happened, but it was tempered by at least some common sense. I mean, when I was a kid, it was still possible for The Dukes of Hazzard to not only be made, but even to be a huge, nationwide hit.
Almost nothing about what people "know" about the Civil War is really true. Especially the notion that the Confederacy was the American equivalent of Nazi Germany.
For that matter, Nazi Germany wasn't even what Nazi Germany is believed to be either.
http://flippingfetchingfiddledeedee.blogspot.com/2018/10/ron-unz-on-jews.html
And not Ron Unz, but another Jewish "defector" telling America what's really going on.
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/israel/freedman.htm
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Republicans vs Democrats
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2018/11/2018-midterms-continued.html
An interesting breakdown of midterm election statistics. What caught my eye the most? The educational divide. Those who have had to endure a university indoctrination are more likely to be democrats. And they say brainwashing doesn't work!
Today's archetypal Republican is a successful small business owner in a trade like plumbing, welding, building contracting, etc. without a college degree, but with several trucks and employees. Today's archetypal Democrat is the over-educated barista at Starbucks with pointless advanced degrees agitating for socialism because her own poor choices have made her desired lifestyle unachievable, and socialism would pay more of her foolishly acquired bills.
An interesting breakdown of midterm election statistics. What caught my eye the most? The educational divide. Those who have had to endure a university indoctrination are more likely to be democrats. And they say brainwashing doesn't work!
Today's archetypal Republican is a successful small business owner in a trade like plumbing, welding, building contracting, etc. without a college degree, but with several trucks and employees. Today's archetypal Democrat is the over-educated barista at Starbucks with pointless advanced degrees agitating for socialism because her own poor choices have made her desired lifestyle unachievable, and socialism would pay more of her foolishly acquired bills.
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Another Dad's comments
Great stuff! Italics is what he's responding to, on CNN.
The American civil war didn’t end. And Trump is a Confederate president
It’s easy to mock this sort of leftist lunacy, now in “Confederate!” form.
But of course the GOP is the party of–and Trump appeals to–married white gentiles. The closer you are demographically to being a (private sector employed) married white gentile, the more likely you are to be a Trump voter.
Rather the big lie here is that the “who whom” is precisely the reverse of what she claims.
His supporters hark back to an 1860s fantasy of white male dominance. But the Confederacy won’t win in the long run.
In the 158th year of the American civil war, also known as 2018, the Confederacy continues its recent resurgence. Its victims include black people, of course, but also immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women who want to exercise jurisdiction over their bodies.
The desire–demand!–for dominance here is not white men wanting to dominate “black people” and “immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women”, but the reverse!
“Black people” and “immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women” are demanding the right to dominate white guys–make white guys work for them and give them their white guy stuff.
They–the “coalition of the fringes” are the “slave power”, trying to enslave white men. Trump’s appeal to us evil white guys is essentially that we can be left alone, live our lives as free men and not be looted and abused by the fringes.
The way you can prove this is who is demanding what from whom? Or who is willing to separate from whom?
This is the acid test that i was attempting to flush out in the previous Zero Amendment comment thread:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-zeroth-amendment-explicated/#comment-2607940
And the distinction between the whines of “oppression” from the fringes and actually slavery in the earlier comment:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-zeroth-amendment-explicated/#comment-2607227
This “who-whom” dependency issue is why i think raising the “separate nations” question is quite powerful and needs to be done by Trump and nationalists repeatedly. Given the open treason and hatred (for white gentiles) that is now routine on the pages of the NYT, i’d be more than happy to split America right now. (We aren’t one nation, when “elites” openly spew out their desire to see the nation’s actual core population dispossessed.)
Let’s have all the Hillary voters group up in their areas–i’ll happily move if that’s necessary. They can have their rainbow hued, open-borders, “nation of immigrants”, hands-up-don’t-shoot, gender fluid utopia. I’m actually not dependent on them and don’t need them whatsoever.
We Trump voters can then have our regular old American nation. We’ll farm our fields, build our houses, tractors, trucks, cars, airplanes, drill for oil and gas (and do solar and nukes) and live our lives and get along just fine … in fact better! without being looted by the fringes.
Mention “separate nations” and the resulting screams of anguish will tell you who is actually intent on looting whom.Be sure and go vote today and get the takers out of power, as much as possible. The more success we have with the ballot box, the less we'll need to appeal to the bullet box.
Friday, November 2, 2018
The Last Days
https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2018/10/from-berlin-beijing-to-brasilia-new-era.html
The New World Order and the Liberal World Order are the same thing; the former is just after the competing ideology of the Soviets was defeated, it took a victory lap and a name change... only to fall apart in a single generation as unsustainable, unsupportable, and in denial of reality.
The Chinese classic of literature, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms starts with the following line: "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been."
The American Empire, united since the Civil War must now divide again to its more manageable constituencies. Hubris will declare that all will want to unite again in the future, assuming we get that far without the Second Coming interrupting the flow of history, but reality will declare that such hubris will end.
It really kind of goes back to the Puritan heresy of Babel; trying to build an earthly Utopia by forcing everyone everywhere to acknowledge the superiority of your vision, and making them live it. No wonder the NWO is the child of Satan; it's literally the warmed over leftovers of his plan from the Pre-existance all over again.
The New World Order and the Liberal World Order are the same thing; the former is just after the competing ideology of the Soviets was defeated, it took a victory lap and a name change... only to fall apart in a single generation as unsustainable, unsupportable, and in denial of reality.
The Chinese classic of literature, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms starts with the following line: "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been."
The American Empire, united since the Civil War must now divide again to its more manageable constituencies. Hubris will declare that all will want to unite again in the future, assuming we get that far without the Second Coming interrupting the flow of history, but reality will declare that such hubris will end.
It really kind of goes back to the Puritan heresy of Babel; trying to build an earthly Utopia by forcing everyone everywhere to acknowledge the superiority of your vision, and making them live it. No wonder the NWO is the child of Satan; it's literally the warmed over leftovers of his plan from the Pre-existance all over again.
Monday, October 29, 2018
Heritage
I think heritage is a fascinating thing. Of course, if you look at my HBD tab, you'll see part of the reason why. Something on the order of 80% of our behavior is genetic. That doesn't mean that we can't overcome genetic tendencies and determine our own fate, of course, but it does mean that the form of our natural man is different, maybe, than our neighbors. Actually, in a normal nation, our neighbors would have similar tendencies, because that's the definition of a nation; a people sharing a common culture, language and genetic heritage. But our nation would perhaps have a different natural man than your nation, and because the people in one nation would have the same expectations of behavior, communities would be more or less peaceful. As long as people of other nations lived in the community in small enough numbers that they couldn't upset this community balance, or if they were merely visitors or passing through, then we'd have a path to world peace. Ironic, isn't it, that segregation is one of the worst bogeymen of the false religion that passes for modern philosophy, yet in reality, segregation is the key to peaceful coexistence between neighboring nations? Just ask the American Indians what they think of segregation, and if they'd be willing to give up their reservations and assimilate in the name of inclusivity.
The other side of this same coin is that we are told repeatedly the proverb that if only we'd spend more time with other people, we'd understand them better and get along better. In reality, we've spent too much time together, we understand each other all too well, and rather than causing us to get along, it's caused us to fail to spectacularly. Up until I went to college, I'd only ever met one person who was an Indian national. This isn't because I was in some podunk little town, but because the vast wave of H1-B migration hadn't happened yet. Nobody knew any Indians. In fact, if you heard the word Indian, you'd be thinking feathered headresses, teepees and peace pipes. But my exposure to many Indians from India in the years since has not caused me to develop a greater appreciation for their culture. Quite the opposite; I now see hundreds if not thousands of small ways in which we are culturally incompatible due to frequent exposure. And when the only reason that millions of them are here is because they're acting as foreign, mercenary scabs to take jobs that can and should have gone to Americans, and to depress Americans' wages, then it almost doesn't matter what positive qualities their culture has, because they are not here in good faith providing a benefit to America; they are, in fact, a detriment, deliberately imposed on America. And they don't even have the benefit of bringing good food with them like the Chinese or the Mexicans.
Now, Indians can practice their culture in India to their hearts' content, and that's great. I have no problem whatsoever with their behavior in their own country, where for the most part, what they do is peaceful, and their interactions with their own people cause no problems. But Indians and Americans interacting and pretending that we're one nation and one people with cultural, linguistic and genetic bonds is a farce, and it doesn't cause us to get along better at all. It's as if I were to invite one of the members of the ward who is significantly different in terms of personality and approach to child-rearing, and everything else to live in my house with me. While we have our own separate houses, we can be good friends. But make us live together in the same house, and we'd just get on each others' nerves too much; we wouldn't get along anymore. We're incompatible for that close of a relationship.
Almost everyone is familiar with this concept from room-mates at college or missionary companions. People that you get along with great in one setting, maybe even your best friends, often aren't anymore when you live together because of the hundreds, and even thousands of little things that are incompatible between your behavior.
Anyway, I'm thinking about this because I went to another ward yesterday for some stake business and as a favor to the bishop; I'm the merit badge counselor for a merit badge his son is working on, and he wanted to review some stuff with me and get it signed off. Since I'm also assigned to be the liaison from the stake YM's presidency with that ward (and a couple of others) I thought it convenient to kill two birds with one stone; make a visit, meet with the boy about his merit badge, and talk to the ward YM president about some YM stuff. Anyhoo, a member of the stake presidency was on the stand. He's actually from that ward. When the sacrament meeting talks ended, there were just a few minutes left, so he spoke for a bit. One of the things he mentioned, and this wasn't the point of what he was saying, but it's what caused me to reflect, was that he and his family had lived in Alabama for a number of years for work before moving here where we live now. As he was preparing to move, locals would caution him about moving up among those "rude Northern Yankees." He thought this was odd and wondered if Northern Yankees really are rude, although upon some quick and dirty observation, he did note that Southerners are more overtly and superficially friendly than Northerners—although he noted that by being friendly, he could get the Northerners to become just as garrulous as anyone else.
But, of course, that's only one aspect of the differences between Yankees and Southerners, and a very superficial one at that. As an ethnic Southerner living here in Yankeeland, I can see the hundreds if not thousands of details that separate us as different nations, and make our current situation of pretending to be "one nation under God" untenable. Almost weekly I'm surprised at something that some Yankee will say to someone else and expect it to be OK, and this is after nearly twenty years of living here. By the same token, I'm often shocked by what they don't say. I've been accused at times of being too blunt, too casual, maybe, and of offending people as well, in ways that don't seem like they'd be an issue to me. But that's because I'm a Southerner (and in many ways, almost a caricature of one) living among Yankees. To me, the biggest disconnect, though, is the way in which Yankees perceive only dimly and in theory the concepts of free agency and individual sovereignty. Yankees have a tendency to expect and even demand community scale conformity in a way that is totalitarian to me; a nannying-busybodyishness that is completely incompatible with the doctrine of free agency as we understand it in the church. If you can't be made to conform via social pressure, then there are really only two responses: 1) double down on the social pressure, and 2) exclude you from the community.
To me, this is the real source of the perception among Southerners that Northerners are "rude." Northerners are just too into your business in general, and feel that they have the right (even the obligation!) to tell you what you should be doing all of the time. They really struggle to just leave you alone, accept your idiosyncrasies, and get along with you just fine in spite of them. And this carries on with Yankees, even when they move. One of the things that I've also noticed is that the majority of members of the Church in America are Yankees. (See some of the JayMan links on the HBD tab.) This shouldn't be surprising; the Church was organized in New England among the descendants of Pilgrims and Puritans, and the core of the membership in America has always been such. It's actually a better explanation for their failure to make a place for themselves in Missouri and Illinois; it's not so much religious intolerance as it was cultural incompatibility that made them unwelcome. As immigrants from Scandinavia and Great Britain came to Deseret, they reinforced and bolstered this cultural founder effect, and the culture of Greater Deseret in the American West is a subset of Yankee culture overall. Since most people all across the country who are members of the church are recent immigrants to the places they live from this Greater Deseret pioneer heritage gathering, most members of the Church have this Yankee personality and mentality with them. Against this is the doctrine of free agency, but the two cause an awful lot of cognitive dissonance and friction, in my experience.
Now, I don't mean this to be a Yankee-bashing exercise. Yankees' sense of community is also what has allowed them to build things that in the South we probably would never have done because we're too individualistic and iconoclastic to ever work together well enough to have done so. If Yankees are prone via their natural man towards community-scale totalitarianism, the heresy of Babel; thinking that they can build utopian communities on Earth, and frequent moral panics and witch-hunts (and they are; would you really have expected anything else from the descendants of the Puritans?) my people are way too fractious, don't get along very well, have poor impulse control and a lower time preference for decision making in general. Benjamin Franklin once said of my people that we were "a race of runagates and crackers; equally wild and savage as the Indians." Another drama that I saw once had one of my people shot in a gunfight; while his mother was bandaging him up, she told him to quit complaining; our people don't die of gun shot wounds, they die of alcoholism and heart disease. This is the legacy and natural man that I have to overcome. I'm not very likely to try and make anyone else conform to my vision; in fact quite the opposite; I need to learn better how to lead my family, because my natural tendency is too individualistic; I tend to even think my family should take care of their own problems. But I'm relatively short-tempered, have poor impulse control, and frequently set the same goals over and over again year after year because my progress towards them has been negligible. None of those should be surprising to people who understand heritage, HBD and genetics. Those are among my weaknesses, because it's my genetic heritage to have them as weaknesses, and overcoming the negative aspects of that natural man is my great challenge, whereas some Yankee will probably have as his greatest challenge learning how to respect others and not try and cram them into fitting to his ideal of what society should look like.
As an aside, I should probably point out that there are two completely different behavioral phenotypes in the South, and they conform to two completely different genetic heritages and cultural origins. When I say that I'm a Southerner, you shouldn't imagine the genteel plantation type and their households. I'm not Gone With the Wind, I'm more like The Dukes of Hazzard. My people were fractious border people from the beginning of recorded history, occupying the border country near Hadrian's Wall where barbarism and civilization had their frontier. After the Romans left, it eventually was raided by the Vikings and became a different border country between the British and the Danelaw. Later, it was the border between northern England and lowland Scotland. It was the home of the Border Reivers, who are my people; part English, part Scottish, all anti-authoritarian. When the border was finally pacified and the Border Reiver way of life started disappearing because a strong enough crown to squash it out finally rose in London, my people came to America because they chafed under the yoke of too much authority and structure. They immediately headed for the backwoods and the frontiers, and became the second type of southerner; although to be fair, some of them were Northerers too, at least if the Mason Dixon line is any guide. They were eager to fight in the Revolutionary War because fighting was what they were arguably best at. They were eager to expand the frontier, and didn't have any problem fighting Indians. Andrew Jackson is the only one of my people that I know of to have ever been elected President. They sided in the Civil War with whomever they thought was likeliest to leave them alone, because they had little interest in bowing to the yoke of the neo-Puritan Yankees or the elitist plantation owners either one. My people in West Virginia, for example, famously made the wrong call and sided with the north, only to regret it shortly after the war and side with the south politically, echoes of which still linger today in electoral maps.
Anyway, like I say, this heritage stuff intrigues me greatly. And, I think it's vital to understanding not only the problems that we have today as a nation (or "nation" as the case really is) but trends of current events and what is likely to happen in the near and middle term future. People who are ignorant (sometimes deliberately) of this stuff will continue to make the wrong calls, to not understand, and to be surprised by what happens.
The other side of this same coin is that we are told repeatedly the proverb that if only we'd spend more time with other people, we'd understand them better and get along better. In reality, we've spent too much time together, we understand each other all too well, and rather than causing us to get along, it's caused us to fail to spectacularly. Up until I went to college, I'd only ever met one person who was an Indian national. This isn't because I was in some podunk little town, but because the vast wave of H1-B migration hadn't happened yet. Nobody knew any Indians. In fact, if you heard the word Indian, you'd be thinking feathered headresses, teepees and peace pipes. But my exposure to many Indians from India in the years since has not caused me to develop a greater appreciation for their culture. Quite the opposite; I now see hundreds if not thousands of small ways in which we are culturally incompatible due to frequent exposure. And when the only reason that millions of them are here is because they're acting as foreign, mercenary scabs to take jobs that can and should have gone to Americans, and to depress Americans' wages, then it almost doesn't matter what positive qualities their culture has, because they are not here in good faith providing a benefit to America; they are, in fact, a detriment, deliberately imposed on America. And they don't even have the benefit of bringing good food with them like the Chinese or the Mexicans.
Now, Indians can practice their culture in India to their hearts' content, and that's great. I have no problem whatsoever with their behavior in their own country, where for the most part, what they do is peaceful, and their interactions with their own people cause no problems. But Indians and Americans interacting and pretending that we're one nation and one people with cultural, linguistic and genetic bonds is a farce, and it doesn't cause us to get along better at all. It's as if I were to invite one of the members of the ward who is significantly different in terms of personality and approach to child-rearing, and everything else to live in my house with me. While we have our own separate houses, we can be good friends. But make us live together in the same house, and we'd just get on each others' nerves too much; we wouldn't get along anymore. We're incompatible for that close of a relationship.
Almost everyone is familiar with this concept from room-mates at college or missionary companions. People that you get along with great in one setting, maybe even your best friends, often aren't anymore when you live together because of the hundreds, and even thousands of little things that are incompatible between your behavior.
Anyway, I'm thinking about this because I went to another ward yesterday for some stake business and as a favor to the bishop; I'm the merit badge counselor for a merit badge his son is working on, and he wanted to review some stuff with me and get it signed off. Since I'm also assigned to be the liaison from the stake YM's presidency with that ward (and a couple of others) I thought it convenient to kill two birds with one stone; make a visit, meet with the boy about his merit badge, and talk to the ward YM president about some YM stuff. Anyhoo, a member of the stake presidency was on the stand. He's actually from that ward. When the sacrament meeting talks ended, there were just a few minutes left, so he spoke for a bit. One of the things he mentioned, and this wasn't the point of what he was saying, but it's what caused me to reflect, was that he and his family had lived in Alabama for a number of years for work before moving here where we live now. As he was preparing to move, locals would caution him about moving up among those "rude Northern Yankees." He thought this was odd and wondered if Northern Yankees really are rude, although upon some quick and dirty observation, he did note that Southerners are more overtly and superficially friendly than Northerners—although he noted that by being friendly, he could get the Northerners to become just as garrulous as anyone else.
But, of course, that's only one aspect of the differences between Yankees and Southerners, and a very superficial one at that. As an ethnic Southerner living here in Yankeeland, I can see the hundreds if not thousands of details that separate us as different nations, and make our current situation of pretending to be "one nation under God" untenable. Almost weekly I'm surprised at something that some Yankee will say to someone else and expect it to be OK, and this is after nearly twenty years of living here. By the same token, I'm often shocked by what they don't say. I've been accused at times of being too blunt, too casual, maybe, and of offending people as well, in ways that don't seem like they'd be an issue to me. But that's because I'm a Southerner (and in many ways, almost a caricature of one) living among Yankees. To me, the biggest disconnect, though, is the way in which Yankees perceive only dimly and in theory the concepts of free agency and individual sovereignty. Yankees have a tendency to expect and even demand community scale conformity in a way that is totalitarian to me; a nannying-busybodyishness that is completely incompatible with the doctrine of free agency as we understand it in the church. If you can't be made to conform via social pressure, then there are really only two responses: 1) double down on the social pressure, and 2) exclude you from the community.
To me, this is the real source of the perception among Southerners that Northerners are "rude." Northerners are just too into your business in general, and feel that they have the right (even the obligation!) to tell you what you should be doing all of the time. They really struggle to just leave you alone, accept your idiosyncrasies, and get along with you just fine in spite of them. And this carries on with Yankees, even when they move. One of the things that I've also noticed is that the majority of members of the Church in America are Yankees. (See some of the JayMan links on the HBD tab.) This shouldn't be surprising; the Church was organized in New England among the descendants of Pilgrims and Puritans, and the core of the membership in America has always been such. It's actually a better explanation for their failure to make a place for themselves in Missouri and Illinois; it's not so much religious intolerance as it was cultural incompatibility that made them unwelcome. As immigrants from Scandinavia and Great Britain came to Deseret, they reinforced and bolstered this cultural founder effect, and the culture of Greater Deseret in the American West is a subset of Yankee culture overall. Since most people all across the country who are members of the church are recent immigrants to the places they live from this Greater Deseret pioneer heritage gathering, most members of the Church have this Yankee personality and mentality with them. Against this is the doctrine of free agency, but the two cause an awful lot of cognitive dissonance and friction, in my experience.
Now, I don't mean this to be a Yankee-bashing exercise. Yankees' sense of community is also what has allowed them to build things that in the South we probably would never have done because we're too individualistic and iconoclastic to ever work together well enough to have done so. If Yankees are prone via their natural man towards community-scale totalitarianism, the heresy of Babel; thinking that they can build utopian communities on Earth, and frequent moral panics and witch-hunts (and they are; would you really have expected anything else from the descendants of the Puritans?) my people are way too fractious, don't get along very well, have poor impulse control and a lower time preference for decision making in general. Benjamin Franklin once said of my people that we were "a race of runagates and crackers; equally wild and savage as the Indians." Another drama that I saw once had one of my people shot in a gunfight; while his mother was bandaging him up, she told him to quit complaining; our people don't die of gun shot wounds, they die of alcoholism and heart disease. This is the legacy and natural man that I have to overcome. I'm not very likely to try and make anyone else conform to my vision; in fact quite the opposite; I need to learn better how to lead my family, because my natural tendency is too individualistic; I tend to even think my family should take care of their own problems. But I'm relatively short-tempered, have poor impulse control, and frequently set the same goals over and over again year after year because my progress towards them has been negligible. None of those should be surprising to people who understand heritage, HBD and genetics. Those are among my weaknesses, because it's my genetic heritage to have them as weaknesses, and overcoming the negative aspects of that natural man is my great challenge, whereas some Yankee will probably have as his greatest challenge learning how to respect others and not try and cram them into fitting to his ideal of what society should look like.
As an aside, I should probably point out that there are two completely different behavioral phenotypes in the South, and they conform to two completely different genetic heritages and cultural origins. When I say that I'm a Southerner, you shouldn't imagine the genteel plantation type and their households. I'm not Gone With the Wind, I'm more like The Dukes of Hazzard. My people were fractious border people from the beginning of recorded history, occupying the border country near Hadrian's Wall where barbarism and civilization had their frontier. After the Romans left, it eventually was raided by the Vikings and became a different border country between the British and the Danelaw. Later, it was the border between northern England and lowland Scotland. It was the home of the Border Reivers, who are my people; part English, part Scottish, all anti-authoritarian. When the border was finally pacified and the Border Reiver way of life started disappearing because a strong enough crown to squash it out finally rose in London, my people came to America because they chafed under the yoke of too much authority and structure. They immediately headed for the backwoods and the frontiers, and became the second type of southerner; although to be fair, some of them were Northerers too, at least if the Mason Dixon line is any guide. They were eager to fight in the Revolutionary War because fighting was what they were arguably best at. They were eager to expand the frontier, and didn't have any problem fighting Indians. Andrew Jackson is the only one of my people that I know of to have ever been elected President. They sided in the Civil War with whomever they thought was likeliest to leave them alone, because they had little interest in bowing to the yoke of the neo-Puritan Yankees or the elitist plantation owners either one. My people in West Virginia, for example, famously made the wrong call and sided with the north, only to regret it shortly after the war and side with the south politically, echoes of which still linger today in electoral maps.
Anyway, like I say, this heritage stuff intrigues me greatly. And, I think it's vital to understanding not only the problems that we have today as a nation (or "nation" as the case really is) but trends of current events and what is likely to happen in the near and middle term future. People who are ignorant (sometimes deliberately) of this stuff will continue to make the wrong calls, to not understand, and to be surprised by what happens.
Monday, October 22, 2018
Ron Unz on the Jews
Isaiah 11:13 "The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off: Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim."
Well, that hasn't happened quite yet. Don't forget; Ron Unz is a Jew. At least, ethnically, although I doubt he's very observant of the religion, if at all.
The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving
The JFK Assassination, part II: Who Did It?
Oddities of the Jewish Religion
The Bolshevik Revolution and its Aftermath
The Nature of Anti-Semitism
Jews and Nazis
Holocaust Denial
9/11 Conspiracy Theories
The ADL in American Society
Well, that hasn't happened quite yet. Don't forget; Ron Unz is a Jew. At least, ethnically, although I doubt he's very observant of the religion, if at all.
The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving
The JFK Assassination, part II: Who Did It?
Oddities of the Jewish Religion
The Bolshevik Revolution and its Aftermath
The Nature of Anti-Semitism
Jews and Nazis
Holocaust Denial
9/11 Conspiracy Theories
The ADL in American Society
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