From my new VDARE.com column:
Andrew Ferguson’s witty and wistful new memoir, Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College, stands in obvious contrast to Amy Chua’s bumptious bestseller, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Between them, the two books nicely illustrate the stately but steady decline of the white upper middle class, of which Ferguson is a sterling representative, in the face of Asian competition for the commanding heights of American society.
Ferguson’s book could be called Wry Observations of the Deer Dad. The gentle satirist comes across as the anti-Chua as he describes what he learned from his family’s 18-month struggle with college admissions mania. The fair-minded Ferguson seems observant, skittish, respectful of his son’s individuality and preferences, slightly passive, and, in the multi-generational long run, dead meat for the tigers of this world.
Crazy U. is not really a how-to guide. Instead, the questions that interest Ferguson most have less to do with helping his son get ahead than with the Big Picture issues of why getting into college has become so frenzied and whether these changes are good for society.
Chua, on the other hand, just wants her progeny to win.
Read the whole thing there.
If something can't go on forever, it won't. That was true of the Housing Bubble, the Dot-Com bubble, Madoff, and yes, even Harvard and Yale. Both are basically discriminating against legacy jocks in favor of non-Whites. So expect future donations to tail off considerably, while bad decisions and just a down market can degrade their investment fund. Tomorrow? Nope. But German universities were top-notch until the 1920's or so.
ReplyDeleteAnd "Tiger Moms" dominating the commanding heights of American society is a recipe for social disaster. I am more convinced than ever that Peter Brimelow is quite correct. Our path is not sustainable. NAM Affirmative Action, much of the US transformed into defacto Mexico, and elites all Asian, are a recipe for active conflict. Because most people are stuck.
I don't know if the insecure Chua personality is a real threat.
ReplyDeleteThis is my passive-aggressive way of saying she's nuts.
Let me add, Alexandra Wallace at UCLA, her "Asians in the Library" YouTube video, got death threats against her and her family forcing her withdrawal. For something White people have to put up with every day (i.e. someone outside your ethnic group saying something disparaging, and accurate, about your ethnic group). Whites are 32% of UCLA's student population, Asians 37%.
ReplyDeleteA largely dual-citizenship, expatriate part-time, tax evading,un- assimilated Asian elite demanding a largely White taxpayer (homeowner property tax) base pay for elite collegiate institutions is not a recipe for happy coexistence. Aka "My kid beat up your tiger cub."
Chua's daughters are half-Jewish and will probably marry Jewish guys or White guys.
ReplyDeleteFerguson talked about the white-only scholarship on Red Eye (Fox News's comedy show).
ReplyDeleteHe's worse than useless, just like the rest of them. Except Carlson, who's only useless.
"Between them, the two books nicely illustrate the stately but steady decline of the white upper middle class, of which Ferguson is a sterling representative, in the face of Asian competition for the commanding heights of American society."
ReplyDeleteParadoxically, Chuaism may be better for America and Fergusonism may be better for China.
The key to life is, as the Chinese might say, YIN and YANG.
Too much yin-yin no good, and too much yang-yang no good either.
Maybe, we can create a variation of yin-yang called pain-gain. We've all heard the saying, 'no pain, no gain'. Though Americans always believed in the 'pursuit of happiness', their social philosophy was founded on Protestant work ethic. In other words, no free lunch. But as America became wealthy and successful, especially in the post-WWII era, young people put off adulthood--and indulged in all sorts of tomfooleries--, the workers felt entitled to rising wages and incresed benefits, consumers demanded easy access to credit and loans, and even poor people got welfare and other free stuff. Americans began to take things for granted. It was if our economy was so productive that it could afford all of us more and more gain with less and less pain--or no pain at all. Many liberals say a nation as rich as the US should provide this-that-such-and-such to everyone, but it never occurs to them that America became rich in the first place because Americans WORKED hard and learned to live within their means--unlike crazy Argentinians of the Peron era who demanded more goodies while the nation was being bankrupted by over-spending.
The link between work ethic and happiness was well understood by most Americans in the past, even blacks who worked at whatever jobs to make ends meet. But then the era of the great boom happened after WWII, with the American economy surging like no economy had done in all of history. It was as if we all hit the historical jackpot, the age of affluence! In the 60s, college kids took jobs for granted as plentiful and so they were more into 'meaning' than money. In the GRADUATE, 'plastics' means nothing to Benjamin Braddock.
So, Americans developed a mindset of gain-gain. We are not supposed to tell people that pain is necessary for gain. American politics could be summed up as 'lower my taxes and increase my benefits'. In this ridiculous therapeutic state where everyone feels entitled to something, Chua's tough talk about hard work, sacrifice, priorities, discipline, and diligence may be the necessary counter-balancing element--the pain element, or the yang to the yin.
After all, what are American kids told by society all around them: get down and boogie, be a stud or a slut, drink and party, use drugs, have fun and more fun. They get this from the media, at school, and even from hipster teachers and boomer parents(who wanna be considered hip and cool by their kids). So, while Chua-ism would have been unnecessary and stifling in the 1940s or 1950s when white folks already were self-restrained and had sense of priorities(and shame too), it may be necessary today cuz too many Americans have been spoiled silly.
ReplyDeleteOtoh, Fergusonism may be good for China(and rest of Asia)where cram school, rote learning, conformism, and etc may be the prevailing norms in educational culture. For Asian parents and students who approach learning as teacher-always-right, memorize-everything-and-regurgitate, cram-for-exam, and measure worth by what college you go to, Ferguson's advice for greater originality and expressiveness may be a good thing(though, to be sure, Ferguson doesn't seem very creative or orginal himself based on Sailer's review of his book).
It's like the tough method is appropriate in STAND AND DELIVER where kids are sorely lacking in discipline while an easier style seems right in the overly rigid school setting of DEAD POET'S SOCIETY(still an awful movie).
America needs tigers, and Asian needs deers. American society is so persmissive that parents really need to discipline and guide their kids. And Asia seems to be too rigid and authoritarian; it would prolly gain to encourage more individualism.
Asia's educational philosophy of pain-pain is probably not psychologically healthy for many young people. Also, over-emphasis on educational/professional success may lead to social snobbery among the successful and social resentment among the unsuccessful. In America, we have a more of a live-and-let-live attitude. Most successful people are't very snobby, and most Americans don't cry in bed cuz they didn't make it into some elite college.
One thing I noticed among my friends... some of them ended as professors in elite colleges--Yale history department, Harvard Sociology, etc--but most of them did undergraduate or even graduate work elsewhere. They went to state universities and got their masters(or even Ph.ds) at places like Georgetown. But one guy--Jewish neocon--must have done such excellent work on Japan that he's now professor of Japanese history at Yale.
So, kids don't have to start off as undergrads at Harvard or Yale to eventually find gigs in such places.
"Alexandra Wallace at UCLA"
ReplyDeleteThough I completely defend her right to express her views, believe that people who made death threats should be prosecuted, and she should be able to attend college withour harassment, I find it hard to believe the great pressing social issue/crisis in America is... 'Asians in the library' or 'Asian parents coming to visit their kids on weekends'.
I mean if THAT was the biggest of our worries!
Her comments have something of this to them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww
Northern Euros are altruistic to the point of exploitation by welfare-exploiting NAMs and Tiger ethnics.
ReplyDeleteOT:
ReplyDeleteObama in front of a "No Justice, No Peace" logo, acting and talking black, from 2007:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNF6iDWdUkI
Interesting to hear his fake accent.
Whiskey is doing his level best to change the subject from his own Scots-Irish clan.
ReplyDeleteIf by altruism, you mean SWPL social whoring. Then yes. Northern Euros are kings. And yes. You will be exploited.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese won't take over because they can't take over, they can only ruin things. China is a giant, filthy dump. Chua's family are among the wealthiest of the Phillipines- that's a great model for the future of the US.
ReplyDeleteThe question is how does the middle class survive in Venezuela...
I am surprised that neither Mr. Sailer (deeply respected by me), nor Mr. Fegusson, nor the discuttants, mention the question of IQ of various students in question.
ReplyDeleteMyself, I would like to see (in life) more "Noblesse Oblige" sense among high IQ graduates.
Your truly, F.r.
The Chinese are taking over only by default and the power of large numbers. They stick together in foreign countries, they work hard, they utilize all loop holes and gaps to win.
ReplyDeleteWhites on the other hand have destructive "white guilt" values, actually believe they is smarter than Chinese because "of the power of positive thinking," will cut another white's throat for five cents, and think a Chinese person that smiles at them, says thank you so often is their friend.
The Chinese have no illusion or inhibitions whatsoever about doing what it takes to get what they want. If they need to grovel they will grovel, if they need to put their foot on your neck they will, and they have no qualms or "guilt" associated with any deception to make a deal.
Young white people are unprepared: they only understand "team sports" principles of business management. However, nobody taught them how to tell who is really on their team.
South China
Sherwood Smith
Thrasymachus,
ReplyDeleteChina is a dump, a bubble, corrupt, but they are taking over for several reasons.
1- 100-200 million are very rich and can buy their way into any country.
2- Americans are so greedy and money oriented they will sale anything for a profit
3- Chinese have very different values and can adjust to almost any environment
4- Chinese have NO guilt complex to hold them back from doing what it takes to win, win, win.
5- Whites are so worried about saving the world, they exhaust all emotions, efforts and resources trying to save the less fortunate at the expense of their own children's future.
6- White's think life is a team sport and nobody really loses.
7- Whites blame Chinese for American's decline when for the most part American, global corporations pushed our jobs overseas, gave our technology away, and the Chinese happily assisted. And the new generation of Chinese is far more spoiled, self-centered, demanding and impatient then the ones most are familiar with. In the future the Chinese will not ask you for something, they will demand and your little white boys and girls you trained to serve will give them everything they demand; with a smile and proper fear your daughters will bow to their Chinese husbands.
South China,
Sherwood Smith
1. East Asia will become rich enough within 20 years that the emigration of educated people will drop to current Japan levels.
ReplyDelete2. Considering the high outmarriage rates of both second generation m/w, there won't be a distinct East Asian ethnic group in the US in the future.
3. Steve is being a whiner and wannabe victim.
I agree that the essay requirements are pretty ridiculous. Harvard used to ask applicants to "Describe Your Academic Goals While at Harvard."
ReplyDeleteOf course, if you truthfully state that you want to get good grades in order to increase your chances of getting a high paying job (or to get into a top professional school), you are probably screwed.
Instead, you (probably) have to pretend that you have some passionate intellectual interest. Which is a crazy thing to ask of a 17 year old.
Besides, if it were mainly about learning and self-enrichment, it's easy enough to get an Ivy League education for free -- just spend 4 years auditing classes. Nobody checks your ID at the entrance to the lecture hall.
Which shows that Harvard knows perfectly well that 99% of its students are there to get a piece of paper which will help them in their professional and social lives.
And yet if you state this simple truth in your application essay, you will probably rejected. Which shows that the whole process is a big farce.
Sailer on Ferguson:
ReplyDelete"He’s a little too nice to be a great satirist and not quite cynical enough to be a great analyst."
Goldsmith on Edmund Burke:
"Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit;
For a patriot too cool; for a drudge disobedient;
And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient."
On the other hand, Burke is still read 230 years later.
Why does Northern Euro status seeking have to involve altruism? In plenty of cultures (Chinese, Indian, etc.) status seeking means build a big house and bragging about your net worth. Not giving your country away to NAMs and Tigers.
ReplyDeleteThere's something inherently defective to them that makes them so destructively charitable, as a group.
"Chua's daughters are half-Jewish and will probably marry Jewish guys or White guys."
ReplyDeleteAnd there are WN types on this board who still won't accept their progeny as white.
@Sherwood
ReplyDeleteI've enjoyed your (realistic) comments about China, where you apparently live. Can you tell us more about your background and experiences there? Do you have your own blog?
What do a white male Berkeley PhD, a white male Duke MD, and a white female who got a M.Eng from Stanford have in common? Three people that I or one of my friends personally knew, who after they graduated, all spent 2-3 years volunteering in third world countries, the first on his parents' dime, the second in a doctors w/out borders type of job, the third in the Peace Corps.
ReplyDeleteThe cream of the crop from white grads are brainwashed into thinking that they owe the third world something, instead of using their talents to the benefit of themselves and the country that gave them the opportunity to excel.
To put things in perspective, Mr. Ferguson lives is described as living in suburban DC (more than likely Bethesda) and that he has two children. It sounds like his children attended public schools (Walt Whitman? or Bethesda-Chevy Chase) where settling on George Washington University would be viewed as failure or attending the University of Maryland would be review as child abuse.
ReplyDeleteIn the suburbs of DC, the parents know that every place below the top ten universities takes careers, employers, and entire fields of work off the table. The parents in the elite DC suburbs want their children to succeed in log-normal career fields and have zero interest in normally-distributed career fields. Attending elite universities is a requirement for many log-normal career fields.
opps,
ReplyDeleteMr. Ferguson's son attended "The Heights school" in Potomac Maryland. A $21K per year second tier private school. http://www.heights.edu/admissions/25tuitionandfinaid.php
His son is attending UVA (US News ranked 25) but is still seen as a safety school by the type of people who live in Potomac Maryland. http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/03/16/crazy.u.dad.ferguson/
The book sounds more like the writing of a parent who wanted to win the prestige game without having to really compete in the prestige game.
Tigers? More like hyenas.
ReplyDeleteI still remember this line from Updike's way-underrated "Roger's Version" twenty-five years ago, spoken by a WASP mother re her kid's schooling:
ReplyDelete"So many clever Jewish children, and now these appallingly motivated Orientals."
That book was one of Updike's more pessimistic ones, from the decline of the WASP:
"How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death."
to a perspicacity about the Reagan years that rings so sadly true today:
"And yet it seemed to me that we all existed inside Reagan's placid, uncluttered head as inside a giant bubble, and that the day might come when the bubble burst, and those of us who survived would look back upon this present America as a paradise."
@Sherwood Smith
ReplyDeleteSo why exactly are you living in the "dump" that is China?
"Chua's daughters are half-Jewish and will probably marry Jewish guys or White guys."
ReplyDeleteHmm, I wonder why you might think that? Could it be that Chinese men are abusive like Amy Chua's distinguished academic father who called her garbage? Or because Chinese men are sexually retarded and never lose their appetite for teenage virgins? Or perhaps could it be because Chinese men are loathesome and neglectful money grubbers who spend as little time as possible with their families, and when they are with their families, all they do is talk about money and their kids' performance in school?
I don’t know anything about Mr. Dornsife’s political or social views, but I’ll bet that they are more conservative than those of the average USC professor.
ReplyDeleteYou can look up political donations in federal elections pretty easily on opensecrets.org.
Dornsife has made 10 donations over the last 15 years, 9 to Republicans.
So expect future donations to tail off considerably
ReplyDeleteTrue. Is there any evidence the groups elbowing the old class of givers out of the way will take on the role of giver with equal enthusiasm? Something tells me turning around and giving money to your alma mater after you've graduated is "naive" and "what suckers do," from certain populations' POV.
Not that Harvard needs the money. But that's beside the point. Harvard wants the money.
Chua's daughters are half-Jewish and will probably marry Jewish guys or White guys.
ReplyDelete"Cognitive elitists" don't care about that. Something tells me they're well aware that a large share of their daughters will wind up marrying white American-American, European-American, or Ashkenazi-American guys. If they consider the long term consequences, they probably figure 1.3 billion Chinese are more than enough to turn 200 million American whites into American yellows over the long term.
"One way gene flow" is the term. You keep your homeland for yourself, and turn your adversary's homeland into a mixing ground. Eventually you wind up with two homelands; your original homeland, and the new one you colonized.
ReplyDeleteChua's daughters are half-Jewish and will probably marry Jewish guys or White guys.
ReplyDeleteAnother ANTI-SEMITE!!! who thinks Ashkenazi-Americans aren't white.
1. East Asia will become rich enough within 20 years that the emigration of educated people will drop to current Japan levels.
ReplyDelete2. Considering the high outmarriage rates of both second generation m/w, there won't be a distinct East Asian ethnic group in the US in the future.
3. Steve is being a whiner and wannabe victim.
"Shhh, go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep little white man..."
Yeah, we know the routine by now. There are 1.1 billion Han crammed into China. Take a look at the population densities of Chinese PROVINCES (not China as a whole, because clearly half of China is unlivable - otherwise Chinese would be living there) and compare to those of U.S. States.
Uhm, yeah, the Chinese want 'em a piece of 'dat, I can assure you. If their incomes match ours in 20 years, that just means hundreds of millions more Chinese able to afford our real estate (assuming we won't finance the deal for them, of course).
Tiger Moms like Chua are spending big bucks to prepare their kids for the Ivies. Then they spend huge amounts on tuition.
ReplyDeleteIs an Ivy degree really worth spending two hundred thousand more then a state college degree? In a long post today Megan McCardle writes.
"several of them were using their Ivy League degrees to perform modestly remunerated administrative and clerical work."
You don't need to spend two hundred thousand in tuition to get a clerical job.
I like how our friend Kato (AKA Yan Shet) doesn't show his face around here. Oh, he's in every iSteve thread related to yellow supremacism, to be sure, but he goes by "anonymous" here.
ReplyDeleteSome time back he used the "it's not a zero-sum game, lulz" line on me. You know, it's okay that I sold my house for five bucks, because, well, I made five bucks!
"Cognitive elitists" don't reciprocate. They keep what's theirs (China, India, Israel, what have you), while they angle for a share of what's yours.
China does not reciprocate. India does not reciprocate. Israel does not reciprocate.
Time to roll up the welcome mat.
I think reciprocity is something the average American can instantly understand.
There's something inherently defective to them
ReplyDeleteWhite skin. See, certain other groups can "pass"...
And there are WN types on this board who still won't accept their progeny as white.
ReplyDeleteUh, because they won't be white? And I don't see WTF political orientation has to do with ascertaining that fact...
"Northern Euros are altruistic to the point of exploitation by welfare-exploiting NAMs and Tiger ethnics."
ReplyDeleteBut was it genuinely altruistic to begin with or was it rationalized as altruistic as a byproduct(of history)?
Anglo-Americans allowed immigration from China in the 19th century not out of altruism but to exploit cheap Chinese labor to build the railroads. And Wasps let the Eastern/Southern Europeans in to fill up the factories and settle/develop empty lands out in the West, not out of any love for the stinking unter-whites.
The bargain was all these newcomers would work their butts off in exchange for a greater equality in the New World. Even so, non-whites like Chinese were hardly equal before end of WWII. And even non-Wasp whites were met with some degree of discrimination.
But as time passed and America got richer, white Americans, especially Wasps--who were securely at the top of the heap--, were able to nicer and fairer, which wasn't exactly altruistic(selflessly generous).
They could live up to the ideals of what the American Constitution stood for--equal opportunity for all. But, Wasps didn't expect to be sidelined or marginalized by other groups and tried very hard to keep the power. They felt secure cuz they were just too numerous, too strong, too rooted in American institutions of power. But meritocracy can change things overnight. Jews academically and intellectually outperformed wasps. They also came up with innovative business models and excelled in new technologies, giving them a leg up as time went by. And Jews were better at finance than anyone else. And as intellectual hotshots, they came to dominate the thinktanks. And as owners of the media, they got to decide what was morally right or wrong in the public eye--which is why 'gay marriage' took off and now people who oppose that stuff are considered as demented freaks.
Wasps didn't lose out selflessly to Jews. They lost out fair and square. And whites didn't lose out to blacks in sports out of altruism. Whites tried damn hard to outrun and outjump blacks... but couldn't. And until hip hop, whites often successfully appropriated various forms of 'black music' as their own.
As for the rise of Asians, was it really altruism on the part of wasps? Or was altruism retroactively invoked to prettify or noble-ize what happened?
In the first half of the 20th century, US had anti-asian laws at all levels of society. And US was mostly chummy with Japan and had a positive view of Japan's imperialist role in Asia. Even FDR was willing to make a deal with Japan; Japan could keep Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan; it just needed to pull out of China proper.
Besides, FDR's main reason for wanting to go to war was to save Europe, not Asia. In fact, though Japan attacked the US, most of US effort until early 1945 went to Europe. And US gave far more aid to Soviets fighting Germans than Chinese fighting Japanese. And US was very mindful of saving Western Europe but hardly did much to save China from communists after WWII.
And all the pro-Chinese sentiments in America during the war was largely due to Japan being an enemy(and ally of Germany). Chinese were mostly despised and feared by most white Americans before the attack on Pearl Harbor--despite the fact that Luce media empire gave favorable coverage to KMT China for many yrs.
By 1950, with the 'Japs' as a defeated nation and China gone communist, US had no special altruistic concern for Asia. China was the big enemy. Japan became an important ally largely because China went communist. That's the main reason for America's 'altruistic' turn when it came to Asian foreign policy. Since most of Asia was communist and/or poor and since Japan had no raw materials, Japan needed to import raw materials and export goods to rich nations, and that meant US in the Pacific. US needed Japan in the Cold War. Japan also became a major base of operations during the Korean War, receiving an economic shot to the arm. But again, it was more self-interest than altruism. Even America's attitude and policy on Korea was wishy-washy and hardly altruistic. Americans left the South vulnerable to attack from the North and then vacillated as to what to do. Americans acted only when 90% of South Korea had been occupied by the North. (Of course, if we go back a little, Korea got divided in the first place cuz FDR told the Soviets to enter the Asian sphere. How altruistic was it for wasp-Americans to ask the Soviets--who already lost 20 million men compared to 350,000 dead on American side--to fight and sacrifice MORE men on yet another major front(though it didn't turn out to be major after all as the Japanese were teetering on the edge of defeat). Though Eastern Europe's fall to Stalin was fait accompli that couldn't be helped, China's fall to communism was and communist domination of northern half of Korea were NOT fait accompli. It was enabled by America's policy of "save our boys even if more Russkies have to die and Asia turns communist."
ReplyDeleteAlso, American war policy killed millions of the enemies--even civiilans--to save our boys. Maybe justifiable on national or military grounds but not very altruistic. And in some ways, nothing has changed. How many Americans have died in the Iraq War? How many Iraqis have died? And while we supply our troops with topnotch equipment, we supply foreign troops with cheapie Chinese-made material.
After the Korean War, South Korea too needed a means to grow its economy. Since it couldn't trade with communist China, it had to turn to Japan(which relied on the US). But the rise of South Korea wasn't exactly the product of American altruism. Americans were economically open to Korean exports because S. Korea was a very loyal--even doglike--ally in the Cold War, the biggest ass-kissers on the planet, at least politically. I recall images on TV as a child, Carter visiting South Korea and being greeted like a god. There was another price to pay on the part of Koreans. They were America's #1 ally in the Vietnam War, which gave Korea an economic shot in the arm like Korean War did for Japan. I read somewhere that during the war, nearly 60% of South Korean economy owed to serving the US. Koreans were especially useful cuz they were like mad-dogs who killed 'commies' by the bushel in a way that Americans weren't allowed to--it would have a 'war crime'. So, money earned by Korea during the war was blood money, not money given out of altruism.
And it's not like Japan or US encouraged industrialization of South Korea, traditionally seen as agricultural land in contrast to the mineral rich industrial north, then under communists(until the early 70s, North had more industry than the South). Americans and Japanese told South Koreans to buy industrial/technological goods from America and Japan, not to build its own. When new dictator Park in the 60s asked for loans, it was denied by both Japan and US. He lucked out because Germans provided it. Why, who knows? Maybe Germany, divided by the war, sympathized with a divided Korea. Maybe Germany, having been a backwater that rose to greatness in 19th century, identified with Koreans trying to do the same. But much of the rise of South Korean economy was accidental, not something driven by boundless American altruism.
With the changes in immigration laws in 1965, more Asians came to the US, but even now, I don't see Japanese-Americans(who pretty much stopped immigrating) or Korean-Americans holding elite positions in much of America. Many of them are middle-level success stories, not powerhouse success stories like the Jews. Chinese-Americans could be a different story cuz many still keep coming. But I see them as natural followers than leaders. Even Chua, as ambitious as she is, is training her kids to be successful-followers than successful-visionary-innovator-leaders. She wants them to conform to the 'best of the west' in music, schooling, etc. She's not training them to be the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, James Camerons, or Bob Dylans of the future. Jews, I think, are better are raising at successful-leaders(and Jews, by nature, are more successful-innovator-leader types. After all, Dylan wasn't raised by his pa to be a rocker; he had the chutzpah to follow his own muse.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, in the newly truly meritocratic world of postwar America, some groups did better than wasps. Not out of wasp altruism but simply because they were better. If we look back, whites did NOT greet Muhammad Ali with great love in the 60s. And whites wanted white athletes to dominate in football and basketball. And whites weren't crazy about losing out to Jews either. And whites in California and elsehwere have been cooking up all sorts of ways to keep Asian numbers down in colleges. In fact, stuff like stress on me-essays and extracurricular activities were meant to favor 'jocks'--more likely to be white--than 'nerds'--more likely to be Asian. It's just that Asian nerds figured they had to join extracurricular activities too--if not football, then the chess club.
Now that wasps have lost big to Jews in business and power, big to blacks in sports and pop culture, and big to Asians in college admissions, the narrative some of them are spinning is, "this all happened cuz we were soooo altruistic, noble, decent, and good.... unlike all those vicious and cunning Jews, Asians, etc, etc" While we shouldn't doubt the element of altruism in American wasp culture and mentality--and all the good it has done in social reform and progress(before PC took it over)--, it's just too simplistic to say whites lost to other groups out of selfless generosity. Instead, wasps lost out cuz they lost the fire(after too much success)and because other groups were naturally better at certain things. But no one wants to say, 'yup, we got our ass kicked'. So, they spin a tale where they lost ONLY because they were just so decent and nice. It'd be like Jerry Quarry saying he let Ali beat him cuz of feelings of 'white guilt'. Of course, blacks pull this shit too. After the aged Foreman lost to Tommy Morrison, he said he let the younger man win out of symapthy. Riiiiight!
It also reminds me of German nuclear scientists. In reality, they tried very hard to make the bomb but came nowhere close. But having lost the war, they spun a bogus narrative that the reason why they failed was intentional, that they were conscientious closet-liberals who didn't want Hitler to have the bomb. Secret recordings of their conversations after capture show otherwise.
It also reminds me of German nuclear scientists. In reality, they tried very hard to make the bomb but came nowhere close. But having lost the war, they spun a bogus narrative that the reason why they failed was intentional, that they were conscientious closet-liberals who didn't want Hitler to have the bomb. Secret recordings of their conversations after capture show otherwise.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you listen to far-right Japanese lunatics, you get the impression that they failed in Asia cuz they were just too nice and generous to the natives during WWII. Yeah, Japanese were just too busy feeding the Chinese to conquer them.
PS. However, I will say that this retro-justification/rationalization of the decline of whites has come to be taken earnestly by many whites to the point that many have become genuinely and mindlessly altruistic. Of course, not altruism is the same or works the same. A working class white person would be wasting his altruism in a society that is rigged against him. But an elite wasp hardly loses out by professing to be altruistic. He will be given the Tom Brokaw treatment. And I'll bet Brokaw's kids are doing pretty well to. For some whites, altruism means they lose out. For some whites--the privileged ones--, it is moral capital that can be cashed in by sucking up to Jews.
Why does Northern Euro status seeking have to involve altruism?
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't. It has to involve morality; the perception thereof is rather fluid. But give me control of the means of communication in China or India and we'll see what I can do with it.
Long run though, "our Asian overlords" is a joke. Take a gander at Europe, where whites wouldn't let other whites run their lives. We're supposed to believe whites will let yellows run their lives? Er, no.
ReplyDeleteNo, this is not a recipe for yellow supremacy. It's a recipe for war.
Which, incidentally, is a much better argument to use on white idiots. White idiots don't mind the concept of a future with "Asian overlords." But the concept of a future of ethnic warfare and mass bloodletting bothers them very much.
Hapalong Cassidy: "And there are types that still won't accept their progeny as white."
ReplyDeleteThat's because said progeny would be 75% Jewish and 25% Asian, and would be raised to feel allegiance to their religious, cultural, and ethnic groups, both of which are opposed to generic Christian Western Whites.
with a smile and proper fear your daughters will bow to their Chinese husbands
ReplyDeleteOh don't throw me in that briar patch.
My guess is that the Harvard Number is a phenomenon that contributes to the health of society.
ReplyDeleteWhen I went to GW graduate school in urban planning all the students were predictably bright and white. At the time it was arguably the best school of its kind in the country. All the students that is except this one guy.
He was very noticeably different. He looked like a gorilla - literally. He was the hairiest guy I've ever seen. All the young planners spent long hours in the studio pouring over the drawing boards. This fellow - I'll call him Og - always took off his shirt in the studio so we could admire the long lanky hair on his back.
He was quite stupid too. He was not only proud of his pelt he was also eager to tell everyone that his rich father paid big bucks for his admission. And his dad was indeed rich. He invited the whole planning class over to one of his houses - or I should say one of his plantations. When I drove through the gate and up the long curving driveway to the main house I could hear the Tara theme buzzing in my head.
I left planning school but kept in touch. Og was the first student to get a planning job. It was for his father, of course, and it was designing strip malls not the high minded mixed usage PUDs we had studied, but it was real work possibly leading to real money. Og took a couple of our classmates with him to chase filthy lucre.
Planning school students are very conservative in their liberalism. They all adored public transportation but had just enough sense of self preservation to never take a bus in Washington DC. I'm sure all of them now drive Priuses.
Without Og all of them were doomed to lives as unhappy and unappreciated civil servants in some miserable municipal planning department. Without Og it never would have occurred to any of them that the noble profession in which they toiled could actually make you rich.
I'm also sure that the sons of hedge fund traders whose fathers came up with the "Harvard Number" enriched their student body. They demonstrate the unalloyed joy of unearned success. They're the blueberries in the muffin.
Albertosaurus
If Whites would stop applying to and attending name-brand universities, their appeal to Asians and Jews would eventually lessen. At present, half of their pleasure is in dominating those institutions founded by and for WASPS, and figuratively saying "Look who's smarter/has the upper hand now!" Just as Jews set up their own country clubs when they couldn't get into the White ones, so too they set up their own schools (Brandeis) when they were supposedly kept out of Harvard/Yale by quotas. They'd still rather go to the historically White institution, however; it's a matter of perceived class/status - both of which are important to both Chinese and Jews. If every Disingenuous White Liberal valedictorian from across the country would simply stop applying, their application/acceptance ratios would change dramatically and so would their appeal. Eventually, the DWL alums would die out and the endowment would suffer, too.
ReplyDeleteI went to a "name-brand" institution, and I've had my name taken off the mailing list. They'll get not a penny from me nor an application from my children/grandchildren if I have any say about it.
Sherwood Smith - excellent points about the smiles and nods lulling DWLs into complacency (whether in China or Singapore or America, the behavior is the same). You need to tweak your "team sports" analogy, however. Chinese (and Jews) operate as a team writ large, although Chinese will favor their immediate family and clan first and other Han Chinese later. When push comes to shove, a White is not and will never be on their "team."
Instead, wasps lost out cuz they lost the fire(after too much success)and because other groups were naturally better at certain things. But no one wants to say, 'yup, we got our ass kicked'. So, they spin a tale where they lost ONLY because they were just so decent and nice.
ReplyDeleteWhy's the game being played in our house, instead of theirs? If they're so much better at the game, why can't we play at their houses some time?
That's the game we lost. Trusting them.
I wonder how much BS is actually sandwiched inside our prolific anon's posts? I routinely skip by them because, well, who has the time? But I just happened to notice that little gem so I responded.
ReplyDeleteSherwood Smith said...
ReplyDeleteWhites on the other hand have destructive "white guilt" values,
And no real racial solidarity either, and no awareness (much less appreciation) of the true strengths of the white race. It wasn't always this bad; IMHO the rot started sometime in the first half of the 20th century, with roots that went far deeper.
actually believe they is smarter than Chinese because "of the power of positive thinking,"
Or just "because we're white", or they confuse smarts with determination and even brute physical force.
will cut another white's throat for five cents,
... and invent a piously PC excuse for doing so! They will say, "he deserved it because he's just a crazy evil no-good racist SOB; and besides it's for his own good." Replace "racist" with "heretical" or "infidel" and you have the same screed of 500 years past. Whitey cuts his white brother's throat often for no better reason that social dominance, and moralizes about it.
and think a Chinese person that smiles at them, says thank you so often is their friend.
While a white person who acts the same way but really means it is some sort of dangerous freak who needs to be punished or reformed.
The Chinese have no illusion or inhibitions whatsoever about doing what it takes to get what they want.
In other words, they have the refreshing heathen honesty about their dishonesty - rather than the liberal-Protestant benevolent sadism of the West.
Young white people are unprepared: they only understand "team sports" principles of business management. However, nobody taught them how to tell who is really on their team.
More edu-corporate sports cultism at work here. BTW, Oxen yoked together to plow fields are also a "team". What do you think is the origin of the word "teamster?"
Teams do have their place, as do individuals - but remember teams can be made up of slaves just as easily as free men.
"They're just better" doesn't fit the facts. It implies everyone's in on the game, which is not the case. Whites are dupes, not simply out-competed. Which is part of what makes the situation unstable. When whites as a whole tumble to the reality of the situation, they're going to be pissed. That's what happens when you find out the ref was bought.
ReplyDeleteWin what?
ReplyDeleteThe evolutionary sweepstakes is having kids.
You need (some) money to rear children, but the rat race goes nowhere.
I wouldn't take a Harvard degree if they gave me one.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteHe was very noticeably different. He looked like a gorilla - literally. He was the hairiest guy I've ever seen....
He was quite stupid too. He was not only proud of his pelt he was also eager to tell everyone that his rich father paid big bucks for his admission.
I am not doubting the veracity of your story, but my experience of hairy people is the opposite. They tend to be very good people - and smart and creative in the extreme - often too creative to function in the corporate world (which has many other prejudices as well).
"Instead, you (probably) have to pretend that you have some passionate intellectual interest. Which is a crazy thing to ask of a 17 year old."
ReplyDeleteHardly. I certainly had passionate intellectual interests when I was 17 - I was a voracious reader of German literature and a huge history buff. Many of the world's great artists were already churning out quality poetry, art and music by 17 - (Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Michelangelo, Schubert, etc. etc.). Certainly most scientists have already developed a passionate interest in the sciences by that age. I would say if you are already 17 and haven't developed a passionate intellectual interest in anything you probably should not be attending an elite institution of higher learning.
Hmm, I wonder why you might think that? Could it be that Chinese men are abusive like Amy Chua's distinguished academic father who called her garbage? Or because Chinese men are sexually retarded and never lose their appetite for teenage virgins? Or perhaps could it be because Chinese men are loathesome and neglectful money grubbers who spend as little time as possible with their families, and when they are with their families, all they do is talk about money and their kids' performance in school?
ReplyDeleteI don't know the exact reason other than a general sociobiological one. The exact reason doesn't matter anyway. The point is that her line is likely to be mostly racially Jewish or White rather than Chinese or Asian.
"One way gene flow" is the term. You keep your homeland for yourself, and turn your adversary's homeland into a mixing ground. Eventually you wind up with two homelands; your original homeland, and the new one you colonized.
ReplyDeleteAmerica will probably be non-white for sure but I don't think it will be yellow.
Consider Amy Chau's book the official primer for how to get your kid into Harvard:
ReplyDelete1) Be a successful Harvard Grad
2) Marry a successful Harvard Grad
3) Micromanage your kids life from cradle to HS junior year.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/04/05/tiger-mother-amy-chuas-daughter-accepted-at-harvard/
Harvard accepted a little more than 6% of its 35,000 applicants this year. I'd say the only way to give your kid an edge is to enroll them in a not very competitive public high school, then have them do lots of extracurricular stuff, and spend no less than 30 hours a week drilling for standardized tests.
Check out this blog.
http://blog.tigermoms.net/2011/03/sophia-chua-rubenfeld-admitted-by.html
We often hear people say that whites/wasps lost the power(substantial part though far from all of it)because they lost the pride of superiority and instead became too nice and generous, almost willing to be inferior. There is some truth to this, but it ignores one of those funny paradoxes of history: superioritism leads to inferiority and inferiotism leads to superiority. It is the classic tale of the hare and the tortoise. The hare, complacent in its superioritism, goes to sleep while the tortoise, aware of its inferioritism, tries harder to catch up and finally surpasses the slumbering rabbit, to the point where the rabbit is too far behind to win the race. Of course, inferioritism can also lead to discouragement and hopelessness. We don't see too many Jews, Mexicans, and Asians trying out for NFL cuz they know they're no match for blacks, big hillbillies, and Samoans. Certain things are really futile, beyond one's reach no matter how hard one tries. But certain things are within reach with enough luck and effort. And in such cases, those burdened with inferioritism may be hungrier, more iron-willed, more willing to 'survive' and succeed that those who are smugly superiorist.
ReplyDeleteThe problem isn't necessarily superioritism per se; the danger lies in the delusions, complacency, condescending generosity, and/or blind arrogance superioritism may engender. If a people rationally and factually understood the real reasons as to their superiority, they'd be more mindful in maintaining it. But if a people come to some mythic notion of their superiority, they take it for granted and won't wake up to new challenges. Or, their sense of political/economic/military superioritism may morph into other forms of superioritism--moral, spiritual, etc, which may eventually undermine one's superior position in the world.
The West conquered the non-West with superior might and invoked Christianity as their superior right, but in time, Christianity was invoked by reformers and by anti-whites to expose the moral hypocrisy of the West, thereby shaking Western confidence. Also, superiotism can become an extreme pissing contest--as among European nations in WWI and WWII--, leading to mutual self-destruction.
Though US won the cold war, the superiorist struggle for global supremacy between US and USSR exhausted the Russians and dearly cost Americans--while Japan and Germany became economic powerhouses.
Another big problem of superioritism is the complacency and blind arrogance it engenders, and we can find some parallels between China in the 19th century and white America in the late 20th and 21st centuries, despite the fact that there are many more crucial differences.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese, over millennia, got to seeing themselves as the best at everything--morally, culturally, artistically, scientifically, militarily, politically, economically, philosphically, etc, so much so that they thought they had NOTHING to learn or gain from the rest of the world. In other words, the main reason for China's stagnation was its superioritism. Japan too was chauvanistic but less superioritist since it was very much aware of the bigger and older civilization next door. Japanese saw themselves as unique but not as the center of the cosmos, or Middle Kingdom.
Chinese superioritism got so out of hand that it not only led to complacency but blind arrogance. Even when Western traders presented Chinese with ample evidence of Western superiority, Chinese mocked and laughed at them. They were so addicted to the psychology of superiority that not even hard evidence made any impression. Initially, the West respected and even feared China as a great world power. West wanted to trade with China and would have been flattered if China accepted Western ideas and modernized.
In fact, much of Western exploration was to seek higher, richer, and greater civiilzations to trade with. It was borne of Western inferiorist hunger to learn from and trade with greater civilizations as much as Western superiorist ambition. Westerners were amazed by the accounts of Marco Polo, for example.
Initially, whites did not see Chinese as inferior or 'sick man of Asia'. At one time, the French court even thought Chinese were the best of all peoples and civilizations. Initially, Westerners didn't use guns on the Chinese but were showing the Chinese that western guns were better in the hope that Chinese would come around to buying more stuff--even the guns--from the West. But Chinese stuck to their superioritism, which paradoxically kept them mired in inferiority. Napoleon sensed the problem of the Chinese and wanted to keep it that way. "China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep." Brits initially had no plans to colonize mighty China but to wake it up to do business. It was like a shopkeeper wanting sells his wares to a king. But, the Chinese chose to sleepwalk in their own superiorist dreamland, and that's when the Brits and others realized they could kick Chinese butt.
What's amazing is how slow China was to change EVEN AFTER Western imperialists began to blow Chinese junks out of the water and invade port cities. Chinese superioritism was so deeply ingrained that Chinese continued to live in a state of denial. The first opium war was in 1939, but dynastic rule remained in place until 1911.
(To be sure, there's another reason why the Manchus, a kind of semi-Chinese, remained in power for so long during the decades of humiliation. Manchus may have hated the 'foreign devils' but they feared the rise of patriotic Chinese masses even more. Manchus wanted to keep the foreigners out, but that entailed the rise of Chinese nationalism. But, rise of Chinese nationalism would mean the Chinese people--most of whom were NOT manchu--cutting off their pigtails which were imposed on Chinese as sign of submission to Manchu rule and overthrowing the Manchu yoke. Manchus occupied an ambiguous place in China. They ruled as the legitimate rulers of China but also as foreign occupiers. For starters, they had conquered China with the aid of Mongol horse-archer mercenaries--80% of Manchu force during time of invasion. And Manchus didn't have to wear pigtails or queues and their women didn't bind their feet. So, Manchus played Chinese against foreigners but also colluded with foreigners to suppress Chinese nationalism, the most frightening of which was the Taiping Rebellion, which ironically was instigated by some Chinese guy who dreamt he was the brother of Jesus Christ. But then, Mao was an extreme Chinese nationalist inspired by the foreign writings of Marx and Lenin. The two-faced role that the Manchus played in Chinese history is somewhat similar to Jewish role in America. Jews, like Manchus in relation to Chinese, are both white and non-white, both American and non-American. Jews play the patriotic card but also the globalist card. Jews fan white American patriotism to promote the Jewish agenda in the Middle East but also suppress anything that smacks of 'white nationalism'. Just as the thing that the Manchus feared most was the flames of Chinese nationalism, what Jews fear most of all is the rise of white American populist nationalism, which is why liberal Jews hate the Tea Party and why Neocons try to appropriate it with the likes of Sarah Palin, the anti-Ron-Paul. So, Chinese in the 19th century were held back not only by the complacent/arrogant slumber of superioritism but by the duplicitous machinations of the Manchu rulers; for example, the Manchu Empress Dowager initially backed the Boxer Rebellion to terrorize foreign devils but then sided with the foreigners to crush the rebellion. In a way, it could even be said that the foreign invasion was useful to the Manchus as a means to divert Chinese rage at anything but themselves--just like Jewish elite in the US divert white American anger at Muslims and Chinese and away from themselves. Manchus feared that the Chinese might blame their backwardness on Manchu rule, which is what eventually happened. One of the most dramatic events of China in early 20th century was young people cutting off their pigtails or queues, an act that had been punishable by beheading for centuries. It could be said that white Americans have been made to psychologically wear jueues, and we need to cut it off if we are to be free.)
ReplyDeleteChina woke up from its slumber only after a century of serious buttkicking by foreigners, but superioritism didn't go away completely. Though Mao's agenda was to destroy the old order, he retained some of the old chauvinistic Chinese attitudes. Just as Chinese of the 19th century would not be convinced of the superiority of Western arms and technology, Mao called the atom bomb a 'paper tiger'. He thought homemade backyard steel furnaces could make steel just as well as Western ones. It was as if Chinese had some mystical quality which, if tapped by a great leader, would make China regain its middle kingdom status in the world. In 1959, he gave the speech about the 'East Wind prevailing over the West'. Even the Soviets, who were technologically far ahead of China, found it arrogant and ridiculous. When Khrushchev said the communists could not win WWIII, which would likely end in nuclear Holocaust, Mao's attitude was 'Big Bomb? Big Deal!', just as Chinese attitude in the 19th century to Western threat was 'Big Gun? Big Deal!'
ReplyDeleteAnd, China today could well fall into another superiorist trap with their rapid rise in GDP. Some Chinese are so sure of their superpower status in the near future that they've become blind to all the real dangers to the overheating economy, pollution, social problems, political corruption, and massive housing bubble in China. If Chinese slumbered in a kind of complacent superioritism in the 19th century, they seem to be addicted to overdose of neo-superioritism since 1950. Though Mao failed, he did try to transform China overnight at all cost. And today, China floors the accelerator to become #1.
Even so, this great ambitiion and hunger were also largely fueled by the realization that China had indeed fallen in the world. It was humiliating enough for Chinese to be invaded by tall Europeans but when the Japanese--regarded by Chinese as island dwarfs--also took a huge chunk of China, that was the last straw. Chinese woke up and stood up--even if, in their desire to be superior again, they may well be climbing too fast to see the abyss on the other side.
Though white American history is very different than that of the Chinese, the decline of white America owes something to superioritism. Superioritism isn't the same as supremacism, e.g. Nazism. A supremacist tends to look down on other races or peoples as less than human or subhuman. A superioritist, otoh, feels he's the best among the human races which, though not subhuman, simply cannot hold a candle to one's own kind. A superiorist feels his kind is not only on a higher plane but that its position is secure, maybe permanently.
White Americans were rarely supremacist in the Nazi mold, but they did develop a sense of superioritism, to the point where they no longer felt threatened by other peoples since they themselves were too powerful, privileged, great, and wealthy. But as time passed, whites lost a good deal of power, and they need to wake up. But then, they are not even calling the shots anymore. But having been accustomed to superioritism, they still feel as though they're calling the shots. For example, Jews rule over wasps, but wasps still speak in terms of 'we must sympathize with poor helpless Jews'. Black-white relations aren't what they used to be, but the paradigm is still 'what can we do for the poor noble suffering negro?'
White American Giant is still asleep in its dream of superioritism.
Somehow, I don't think Asians will become the new elite in the commanding heights of the economy or society. It seems very farfetched. Fair to middling, yes. Upper middle class, yes. Bill Gates, eh, not really.
ReplyDeleteA largely dual-citizenship, expatriate part-time, tax evading,un- assimilated Asian elite demanding a largely White taxpayer (homeowner property tax) base pay for elite collegiate institutions is not a recipe for happy coexistence.
ReplyDeleteThere's a distressing amount of truth to this. I teach this population in enrichment classes, and I love my kids to death, but their parents are quite clearly gaming the system and raising their kids to think of themselves as Korean/Chinese/Indian/Taiwanese. One student in my class loudly proclaims she's Taiwanese, refuses to acknowledge that this is ethnic Chinese, and is always surprised when I remind her she was born in California.
None of my own students engage in the behavior I'm about to describe, but the institution I work for has many families who deliberately send all their money overseas, declare no income (despite driving nice cars and living in reasonable accomodations) and move to states that offer full rides to students of low income with good grades--or apply to private universities with these sorts of scholarships.
They clearly do not see themselves as American. One thing I am constantly stressing to my kids (I'm amazed their parents haven't complained) is that they are American, and they should think about what that means. They are interested in this conversation. I doubt their parents are.
It's been general human behavior that when a "Market Dominant Minority" tends to lord things over the natives, they get ethnically purged by pogroms. That has been the experience of Chinese Diaspora people in SE Asia. Or Jews in Russia. It was precisely for that reason that the old line Hollywood Moguls, adopted the "more American than Americans" line and made the Fourth of July their birthday (Louis B. Mayer) and produced 100% pro-American patriotic films. Or stuff like Superman, and Captain America.
ReplyDeleteLook at say, Korean and Black relations in LA's South Central. Not the picture of amity. Economic success can always be trumped by mass violence, and always has been. That's not a recipe for social progress.
Does this mean elite universities should start having affirmative action for whites? (Just asking.)
ReplyDelete"It's been general human behavior that when a "Market Dominant Minority" tends to lord things over the natives, they get ethnically purged by pogroms. That has been the experience of Chinese Diaspora people in SE Asia. Or Jews in Russia."
ReplyDeleteYeah, but in the US who are the natives? We are all minorities, now. And whites won't fight back, even when they're physically assaulted by non-whites on the street. So who exactly is going to mobilize against the Chinese elite? The same people who mobilized against the WASP and Jewish elite while they were facilitating the destruction of the white majority and Western cultural norms?
Easier to learn Mandarin and develop a taste for stir fried eels. This will impress your new overlords.
"Manchus occupied an ambiguous place in China."
ReplyDeleteGives a whole new meaning to the 'Manchurian Candidate'.
There is a terrible day of reckoning coming...Vae vicitis
ReplyDeleteAmerica will probably be non-white for sure but I don't think it will be yellow.
ReplyDeleteI agree. TPTB don't seem too fond of yellow immigrants.
Yeah, but in the US who are the natives? We are all minorities, now.
ReplyDeleteTrue, as far as it goes.
And whites won't fight back, even when they're physically assaulted by non-whites on the street.
Says who?
So who exactly is going to mobilize against the Chinese elite? The same people who mobilized against the WASP and Jewish elite while they were facilitating the destruction of the white majority and Western cultural norms?
Easier to learn Mandarin and develop a taste for stir fried eels. This will impress your new overlords.
Han don't have it in them to be conquerors.
You seem to be suggesting that more Anglo parents model themselves on the Tiger Mom. But isn't it a principle of HBDism that most folks are they way they are? You just can't tell them to act Asian.
ReplyDelete-Osvaldo M.
Easier to learn Mandarin and develop a taste for stir fried eels. This will impress your new overlords.
ReplyDeleteYou got that part right, though. Losing is always easier than trying to win.
Mitch says "I'm constantly reminding these kids they're Americans." Uh, no, as you yourself note, they're Chinese (or Korean) who happened to be born in the United States. They look Chinese, they think like Chinese, they've been raised to consider themselves Chinese, and they behave (academically, socially, commercially) like Chinese. The liberal cry of "assimilation" or "we're a nation of immigrants" does not apply. Cut off all immigration, isolate the immigrants within the majority population for about 50 years, and try again - perhaps. Point is, there is constant and continuing immigration, the majority population is soon to be the minority, and you have don't even have 5 years before it all comes crashing down - courtesy of behavior like that of the Chinese immigrants, multiplied exponentially.
ReplyDeleteStill... better deer dad than queer dad.
ReplyDeleteI'm not aware of any Asian country that could be described as altruistic and love-the-world. I'm also not aware of any northern/Western Euro country that is ethnocentric to the point of keeping out foreigners.
ReplyDeleteEven in the U.S., it's the most overwhelmingly northern Euro areas where altruism run highest (ie Minnesota, Wisconsin, Vermont). NAMs don't practice it (outside their ethnic groups), Asians don't practice it. Even Italians and Greeks on the east coast are wary of it - both groups are technically white and are well assimilated, but they think like NAMs and Asians.
Culture matters and so do elites, but there's got to be something in northern Euro DNA that's defective. Too many Northern Euros, and too few everyone else, are ready to empty out the national bank account to feed Haiti.
"Chua's daughters are half-Jewish and will probably marry Jewish guys or White guys."
ReplyDeleteAnd have 1.6 kids total. Not per daughter, total.
-Osvaldo M.
The Tiger Mom approach can backfire, too. I knew a couple of Tiger Mom kids in college who committed suicide because they weren't doing as well as they hoped and couldn't bear the shame of letting down their extremely demanding parents. I also knew more than a few who completely cracked up from the strain of trying to please their impossible-to-please parents and dropped out. It takes the right kind of personality as well as intelligence if your kids are to succeed in today's high-pressure society.
ReplyDeleteEven Chua, as ambitious as she is, is training her kids to be successful-followers than successful-visionary-innovator-leaders.
ReplyDeleteYou can't train successful visionary innovator leaders. Get real.
_Osvlad M
"You can't train successful visionary innovator leaders. Get real."
ReplyDeleteBut you can guide them. Orson Welles was a born genius but his parents also exposed him to tons of books, interesting people, art, music, theatre, etc. His mother told him when he was young, 'you can do anything you want as long you act like an adult'(or something like that). So, from a young age, he thought and spoke like a little giant. He wasn't 'trained' but he was exposed to the right material which inspired him to find his own way.
"I'm not aware of any Asian country that could be described as altruistic and love-the-world. I'm also not aware of any northern/Western Euro country that is ethnocentric to the point of keeping out foreigners."
ReplyDeleteBut I met some Filipino and Korean Christians who really do wanna evangelize the world and hug everybody. It's like they picked up where the white man left off.
I was never a believer but used to hang around some Christian college students, and the most fanatically save-the-world-ish happen to be Asians. Filipinos have long been Catholics but some of them are born-again Chrisitan nutheads. And South Korea, unlike Japan and China, became very Christian. The Korean Christian nut-girl I knew in college went to do missionary work in Dominican Republic, I was told.
And I hear Christianity has been rapidly spreading across China. Maybe it's the second Taiping Rebellion.
But I met some Filipino and Korean Christians who really do wanna evangelize the world and hug everybody.
ReplyDeleteHug everyone, pass the ammunition, and keep the feng shui kits, acupuncture needles*, and Buddhist prayer mandalas burning.
* I know these are solid metal and won't burn, but why spoil a good parable?
The Ivy League U's will simply lose their position of prominence in our society. So far Asians have not demonstrated an ability to lead, whatever methods they are using to game the system and get into the formerly prestigious schools in our country. Americans aren't fooled by school names or number of academic degrees.
ReplyDeleteI mean, really, there is an upper limit on IQ. Those professors who ended up at state U's along with those students who had financial limitations keeping them from indulging in pipe dreams of attending Harvard, Princeton or Yale are just as smart as those whose parents could afford to tailor their child's life from pre-K to high school so that he/she could be Ivy League material.
The American public is not easily confused by where you attended college vs what you reveal by past actions and stated intentions. As a person who didn't attend a legitimate Ivy League institution, Sailor, I'm surprised by your obsession with brand related prestige. At it's outset, the Ivy League was a vehicle for high status people to keep their children, with or without similar ability, in the upper echelons of society. A true meritocracy would focus on what a high IQ child would be expected to achieve from any background. Money for training in and interest in the pop music of the 1800's would seem to be contraindicated. Of course I have a minor obsession with the former USSR which might be affecting my views on the subject but, wrt, musical ability, what about perfect pitch and an intuitive knowledge that allows for improvisation and key changes vs classical training in piano or voice which merely requires an over the top work ethic vs. actual musical talent. Get real. Even athletic ability outside what the middle class can afford to create in their offspring is observable. So you paid for the series of lessons in childhood that allowed you to qualify to pay for the series of courses at a certain university later on. Big deal!
Go Andrew Ferguson! You didn't pimp your child so that he could attract the attention of an overrated institution of higher learning because his dad could afford to give him tutoring in a area that some other child might have shown a greater aptitude for were we to do a better job of testing all our children.
"I certainly had passionate intellectual interests when I was 17 - I was a voracious reader of German literature and a huge history buff."
ReplyDeleteWhat did you major in in college? Did you go to grad school, and if so, what did you study? What is your profession?
This is pretty much the best iSteve comment thread ever. Great comments from Sherwood Smith, Sheila, asdfsfdf, Svigor, Mitch, even Whiskey was superb, with not a Truth comment in sight.
ReplyDeleteAsians are completely unable to lead. Look at how few of their companies have market caps of $1 billion and are completely unable to compete with American or European companies.
ReplyDelete"Asians are completely unable to lead. Look at how few of their companies have market caps of $1 billion and are completely unable to compete with American or European companies."
ReplyDeleteNintendo, Sony, Toyota, Honda, Samsung, LG, Lenovo...
A)STOP immigration. Problem,not solved,but ameliorated. B)White people marry very very 'lite-skined'blacks,identify your kids as AA. (or just say "Fuck it" and LIE. I'd love to see evry single white kid check African-American on his SAT.)This will not only undermine AA,fuck with the a-holes who run the schools and corporations,piss off the blackety blacks,but be quite FUNNY!
ReplyDeleteI've met some Asian kids that were world-hugging evangelists too, but I don't think they are very representative of their ethnicities. In Korea and Japan, there's really no pressure whatsoever to open up the immigration system or even admit refugees.
ReplyDeleteI'd say that given how distributions work, yes you can find Asians that want to hug everyone in Haiti. Just not a significant minority, unlike the U.S. Here it seems that every respectable person, and much of the massses, feels that way.
"If Whites would stop applying to and attending name-brand universities, their appeal to Asians and Jews would eventually lessen."
ReplyDeleteWHAT??? So, if whites all applied to community colleges, Jews and Asians would wanna go to community colleges too?
It's like saying, 'if whites didn't try to play in the NFL, blacks wouldn't either.'
He was very noticeably different. "He looked like a gorilla - literally. He was the hairiest guy I've ever seen. All the young planners spent long hours in the studio pouring over the drawing boards. This fellow - I'll call him Og - always took off his shirt in the studio so we could admire the long lanky hair on his back."
ReplyDeleteI know who you are and I'm gonna kick yer ass!!!
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteWhy don't you write a book?
Win what?
ReplyDeleteThe evolutionary sweepstakes is having kids.
You need (some) money to rear children, but the rat race goes nowhere...
Very good point. As someone else noted, Chua will be lucky if she gets one grandkid out of her two instrument-playing daughters.
When you think about it, it makes zero sense to drive your daughters into high-stakes, high-pressure careers. It practically guarantees the end of your genetic line.
WHAT??? So, if whites all applied to community colleges, Jews and Asians would wanna go to community colleges too?
ReplyDeleteIt's like saying, 'if whites didn't try to play in the NFL, blacks wouldn't either.'
The point remains, prestige = majority Anglo-European males, and the more Anglo the better.
This applies to just about every institution I can think of. Nobody brags about moving into an Armenian/Persian/Russian neighborhood in LA, regardless of how rich their neighbors are.
Same with the military, where everybody gets a black beret and DADT becomes Never Shut Up. The elite white combat and SF troops are heading for Xe and DynCorp as fast as they can.
For Asians and Jews, this is what is known as a Pyrrhic victory.
Interesting analysis Steve. That said, I find your opinion of Ferguson charitable. He always struck me as kind of smug and self satisfied, albeit in a low key enough way imitate pleasantness.
ReplyDeleteWhat are Chua's kids planning on studying at Harvard anyway? Harvard might be so elite that no matter what you study there you're bound to end up prosperous. Maybe so, but from what I can tell, in the State School world, what you study makes a bid difference.
ReplyDeleteNo one in the work world cares about your wonderful Cello recitals and ability to recite Yeats/Longfellow or whatever Chua is pounding into her kids to get them into Harvard.
Harvard is a bastion of the rich, but getting rich enough to send your kid to Harvard is the real hurdle.
CWest-Sizzle, Peace Out!
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteWhy don't you write a book?
Please God...
@Sherwood Smith
ReplyDeleteSo why exactly are you living in the "dump" that is China?
Same reason the "cognitive elitists" all insist on sharing their glorious intellects and presences with us, instead of selfishly hoarding them in China, India, and Israel?
The needle on my selflessness-detector is breaking.
Actually, chances are Sherwood's making the yella fellas some serious money, since they don't generally take charity cases.
But I met some Filipino and Korean Christians who really do wanna evangelize the world and hug everybody. It's like they picked up where the white man left off.
ReplyDeleteI was never a believer but used to hang around some Christian college students, and the most fanatically save-the-world-ish happen to be Asians. Filipinos have long been Catholics but some of them are born-again Chrisitan nutheads...The Korean Christian nut-girl I knew in college went to do missionary work in Dominican Republic, I was told.
I think this makes pretty good sense, and isn't too surprising. If we're willing to be somewhat speculative, I suspect there might be several different personality tendencies interacting in various ways. I'd probably agree with those who argue that Nordics and Germanics tend to skew more towards general altruism and "idealism" than most other groups, along with greater tendencies toward social conformism. Meanwhile, I'd doubt that East Asians are especially altruistic in general, but they are extremely socially-conformist, even more so than the Nordics, so to the extent that they're socially "trained" in altruism, they might come pretty close to matching those other groups in actually expressed behavior. That's probably what's going on with the Christian-altruistic-fanatic Asians. By contrast, I'd bet that lots of other groups won't behave in such a way no matter how heavily they're "trained."
All these ethnic tendencies, which are probably a complex mix of the cultural and the genetic, interact in lots of interesting ways, which are similar to what might happen among the various species interacting in a particular ecological niche.
(continued)
ReplyDeleteAnd here's an example of a fascinating datapoint I came across a few years ago. Someone posted a photo showing the entire international Linux Open Source development team, consisting of around 50-60 individuals. As I recall, based on the looks and the names, there were something like 2-3 Meds, a couple of Jews, a seemingly light-skinned black, and a sizable handful of Asians, but with all the remainder being Nords, overwhelmingly Nordics, Germanics, and British-surnamed, with a few Slavs. Given the international nature of the enterprise and its complete permeability to people of ability and interest, this really is a quite remarkable skew relative to what one might suspect.
For example, since Jewish ability peaks so strongly exactly in the symbolic-manipulation category ideally suited to software development, the negligible representation of Jews might seem something of a real puzzle. But Jews also tend to be strongly oriented towards success/practical/business/money goals, and obviously volunteering all their time to produce free software for everybody in the world doesn't really fit with this. So although it seems likely that Jews have considerably stronger innate software ability than Nordics, they probably tend to go to work for Google or Oracle or start their own companies rather than get involved in the Open-Source Linux movement. I'd think the same goal-orientation is also generally true for Meds, and most other groups around the world. It's an interesting fact that something like 100% of all the software created in Europe is produced by Northern Europeans and something like 0% by Southern Europeans, even though those two groups aren't so enormously far apart in modern prosperity or IQ.
Another rather common Jewish trait is a tendency toward extreme zealousness/fanaticism, so it's hardly surprising that the entire Open Source software movement was actually founded by Richard Stallman, generally described as the world's greatest programmer/hacker, and probably a person of far more long-term historical importance than Bill Gates. As it happens, Stallman never seems to have cared the least bit about money/success----trait distributions are after all just trait distributions---but devoted his entire fanaticism solely toward creating free software and attempting to defeat and eradicate non-free business software.
Now Stallman himself naturally created a small organization to build all his intended software, but being an exceptionally quarrelsome and abrasive individual---another not uncommon Jewish trait!---he endlessly quarreled with all his friends and associates, and little was actually accomplished. Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds, a quiet and cooperative Nordic just out of college, became inspired by Stallman's ideas and a Stallman speaking tour of Finland, got together with a few of his equally non-quarrelsome friends and actually built the Linux operating system, which now dominates the vast majority of the world's computer systems. As a result, it was Torvalds rather than Stallman who was internationally hailed as the heroic "Luke Skywalker" of the worldwide Open Source movement, an outcome which proved enormously irritating to Stallman.
This same pattern of Nordics or northern Germanics tending to produce most of the world's best and most important Open Source software is really quite remarkable, and extends far beyond merely Linux. I also think it's probably more than just pure coincidence that the same ethnic distribution is reasonably widespread in the crucial areas of Silicon Valley as well, despite the very different socio-cultural-financial framework.
Exploring the complex interaction of the various ability distributions and personality traits of different groups and their actual consequences in the real world is really a fascinating subject...
I was never a believer but used to hang around some Christian college students, and the most fanatically save-the-world-ish happen to be Asians. Filipinos have long been Catholics but some of them are born-again Chrisitan nutheads...The Korean Christian nut-girl I knew in college went to do missionary work in Dominican Republic, I was told.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the only kids I knew in college who went on to do missionary work were Korean and Chinese evangelicals. On the other hand, I knew plenty of white non-religious types who went the Peace Corps route. Don't recall any black, Middle Eastern, or "ethnic white" kids who wanted to waste their lives in third-world hellholes a la Amy Biehl.
Maybe we need to define 'altruism' a bit more clearly or look into the possibility that there may be more than one kind of altruism.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking of my sophomore yr in college when I roomed with some girls. One girl was Czech-American whose ambition was to work for the CIA; her parents contributed nothing to her tuition. Their hard-earned money was for themselves--vacation, clothes, to enjoy life, etc. She had take to out loans and work part-time to pay for tuition. Strange, I thought, since her parents seem had really good jobs. Another girl was Vietamese-American and her major was literature. Her parents foot the entire tuition. As owners of a small-carryout busienss in the inner city, they couldn't have ben making much. But they were 'sacrificing' for their kid. She said her parents didn't want her to work cuz it might interfere with her study. Now, I don't know how typical these cases are among Czech-Americans and Vietnamese-Amerians, but it seemed like the parents of the Czech-American girl cared more about themselves while the Vietnamese-Americans were willing to do anything for their daughter to attend college and excel(despite the fact that literature is not a good bet for future money making). Otoh, maybe the parents of the Czech-Am girl were not being self-centered or selfish but trying to make their girl to grow up and become self-reliant. Well, that's the reason or excuse I got from my parents.
If there's a thing called familialtruism, maybe Asians have more of it. Parents are willing to work long hrs under miserable conditions to make a better life for their kids. And Jewish parents were also very familialtruistic if we go by all those Jewish literature about peddlers and shoemakers, etc. Working and working so that their kids could rise in the world. Not all cultures are like this.
I think it was Gay Talese who said his Italian-American father was atypical--in a way more Jewish--in the sense that he really wanted his son to rise above him.
I remember reading an article where in an Indonesian village, the men eat the food first while women and kids have to do with scraps. So, you got well-fed fathers and kids with bloated bellies. Altruism can fail even at the familial level.
One of the reasons why Brazil and Mexico hand out public assistance checks to women is because men in those nations are not very responsible to their families. And in the black communities, many men don't even stick around to care for their kids. They don't care about the 'hos' or the kids.
So, it seems to be me altruism begins in the family. Parents living for their kids... which also may lead to children living for their parents. There are many Jewish stories about children's guilt complex: since parents did everything for the kid, the kid feels he has to make something of himself in the world, not least to provide a good life for his parents in their golden yrs(buy them a house in Florida or some such). It could be said Vito Corleone dirtied his hands dealing with the scum of the Earth to take care of his family. And Michael blew his chance to become a legitimate respectable American to take care of his father. Both sacrificed a piece of their soul for the family.
And traditionally, I believe Chinese burned money--sometimes real money--to appease the gods that they wouldn't torment the souls of ancestors so badly. Chinese felt they must live not only for the here and now but for the line of kinship that went back to time immemorial.
Of course, familialtruism is a very limited kind of selflessness. There may also be something called tribaltruism or nationaltruism. Here, people are willing to work or even sacrifice their lives for the common good/survival/glory/honor of the tribe or nation. Though Nazis and Japanese militarists were lacking in altruistic feelings toward outsiders, they were intensely altruistic about their own tribe/nation. Nazi Germans willingly laid down their lives for Germany. Japanese Kamikaze pilots were resolved to die to shield their 'sacred motherland' from foreign invaders. Vietnamese communists, along with the Spartan 300, were among the most tirbaltruistic people that ever lived. Even though they knew they were gonna get massacred, they kept throwing themselvs at Americans in the name of the 'motherland'. To be sure, communism is an anti-tribalist ideology, but in practice, most communisms were fiercely nationalistic. In the early yrs of Russian and Chinese communism, many young people were enthusiastic and willing to work long hrs for no pay for the communal/national good.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to tribaltruism, Japanese must be near the top. Those 50 guys who worked at Fukushima knew they aint gonna live long. Certain Northern European peoples also score high in nationaltruism. One could say a long history of homogeneity in East Asia and Northern Europe creatd a stronger and more trusting bond among the people since even non-family members were seen as part of the cultural/national tribe.
Politically and socially, there are two kinds of altruism: talltruism and falltruism. Talltruism is when the lower ranks are altruistic to the upper ranks, and falltruism is when the upper ranks are altruistic toward the lower ranks. Asian societies have traditionally been talltruistic, with lower ranks selflessly bowing down to and even sacrificing their lives for the upper ranks/superors. In Kurosawa's BAD SLEEP WELL, lower-level guys take the blame for the scandal to spare the top-level guys. Tall guys have the advantage. In Endo's SAMURAI, the underlings understand it's their duty to die for the upper-guys.
In a falltruistic system, the guys at the top are supposed to be concerned with the welfare of people on the bottom. Most democracies are like that, with, for example, John McCain yammering about how we should feel compassion for some illegal pregnant Latina. It's like rich/powerful folks should be concerned with and take care of all those wondrful poor blacks, browns, white trash, etc.
ReplyDeleteMost systems are a combination of talltruism and falltruism. Fascism sought to balance the two. Workers/masses/soldiers should work and fight for the great leader(who embodied national glory), and the government should pressure capitalists to make concessions for the good of the noble workers.
Even so, the German brand of fascism, Nazism, failed cuz it was ultimately too talltruistic, with millions of Germans blindly sacrificing everything for the vainglory of the Fuhrer.
The most idealistic and abstract form of altruism may be compassion and sympathy for the OUTSIDER--not of the same family, tribe, or even nation. Instead, compassion for starving Africans or poor Afghan women without human rights, etc. If certain kinds of sympathy--for family and tribe--come rather naturally, sympathy and concern for complete outsiders do require an idealistic, spiritual, or philosophical form of altruism. So, Jesus was said to have sympathized with all mankind. So, Buddha was said to have felt sorry for all humans and even all animals(which suffered too). So, Mother Teresa spent her entire adult life in India among beggars, whores, diseased, and etc. Though this kind of altruism can be noble in a saint or holy man, people of this disposition generally give me the creeps. (The nun in the original BAD LIEUTENANT made me wanna vomit.) I mean just look at most of humanity. They are jerks and a-holes undeserving of sympathy. I would help them out in an emergency--tornado or earthquake--but otherwise let them catch their own fish.
Finally, there may be a thing called individualtruism. Though Ayn Rand spat on the very concept of altruism, her argument is indeed a kind of altruism because it posits that a world that gives free reign to great individuals will be better for ALL humanity. If we allowe the best to produce wealth, innovate, create great art, and etc, etc, we will all benefit from these great achievements.
In IT'S WONDERFUL LIFE, George Bailey has the choice of individualtruism and communaltruism(which in the small town of Bedford Fall is also a kid of tribaltruism since everyoen konws everyone). While Potter is just a miserly monster, the young George wanted to do great things not because he wanted to horde money but because his great deeds would benefit mankind. He wanted to BUILD things--bridges, oil wells, etc--, the stuff that would be of use of everyone. After all, Though Sam Wainright seems like a rich smart jerk, he does build stuff for the Us airforce and helps out his friend at the end cuz he succeeded as an individual.
""Chua's daughters are half-Jewish and will probably marry Jewish guys or White guys."
ReplyDeleteAnd there are WN types on this board who still won't accept their progeny as white."
And with good reason, since said progeny would be 1/4 Chinese.
Certainly it's a better reason than the biracial Obama had for listing himself only as "Black, African Am., or Negro," on the 2010 US Census, refusing to acknowledge the ancestry he inherited from his white mother.
Obama and the 2010 Census
Speaking of altruism, consider the flashback scene at the end of GODFATHER II.
ReplyDeleteSonny, channeling his pa, says only 'saps' fight for their 'country'--a bunch of strangers. Michael doesn't see it that way; he tells others that he signed up with the Marines.
When I first saw the film, I was on the side of Michael, especially since it was the 'good war'. There is a bigger humanity and higher good to fight for.
But when we look at the kind of wars and foreign interventions/affairs we've been embroiled in for the last 2 decades, I've also come to see things from Sonny's point of view. While we can sympathize with Iraqis and Libyans, what are American boys doing dying for strangers in other countries, especially when they didn't attack us and pose no threat to us?
I've never known any white ethnics that wanted to save the world. Italians only care about buying a big SUV and driving it up and down Staten Island. Among white, it's mainly northern/Western Euros that act like this.
ReplyDelete@Sherwood Smith
ReplyDeleteSo why exactly are you living in the "dump" that is China?
There are several reasons:
1- I find the Chinese to be very interesting.
2- Watching the West long distance has really made me aware of how lost we are as a group.
3- I have become race conscious.
4- I have become Jew conscious.
5- Watching American Global Corporations pushing PC, multi-cultural thinking, etc on Chinese employees is interesting.
8- Watching Americans operate in China is interesting.
9- The longer I stay the more frustrated with the decline of America and the White Ruling Elite who shape our values, culture and future.
10- When the Chinese central government makes new laws, at least they make sense and seem to benefit the Chinese people; when American central government makes new laws I don't see any benefit for the American people. That is interesting.
11- China IS dirty, polluted, and frustrating at many levels..
Anon's review of China and the Manchus is very good and is worthy of more details.
America and the West really is ignorant about China, and could greatly benefit from a better understanding of China instead of the stupid anti-china mentality presented by the anti-Walmart type people and blue collar workers who lost low skilled jobs, etc.
Sherwood Smith
"""Chua's daughters are half-Jewish and will probably marry Jewish guys or White guys."
ReplyDeleteAnd there are WN types on this board who still won't accept their progeny as white."
And with good reason, since said progeny would be 1/4 Chinese."
Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that it's likely that you wouldn't be able to tell that a person is 1/4 Chinese by looking at them. Or you would only if it is pointed out to you. For instance, most people would not be able to tell that actress Kate Beckinsale is 1/4 Burmese unless someone pointed it out.
At any rate, my 1/4th Korean kids will not be telling anyone of their ancestry unless it is relevant. Hopefully we won't be going to Nazi-style racial purity investigations in the future. I doubt even the most radical on this board would go that far.
@Sherwood
ReplyDeleteWould love to hear more!
3- I have become race conscious. [Conclusions?]
4- I have become Jew conscious. [What about China made you Jew conscious?]
5- Watching American Global Corporations pushing PC, multi-cultural thinking, etc on Chinese employees is interesting. [What do the Chinese think?]
8- Watching Americans operate in China is interesting. [Details?]
How unstable do you think China is?
Three more kinds of altruism.
ReplyDelete1. Spiritualtruism/idealtruism. Both are closely linked. Though certain ideologies(like communism)and higher spirituality tend to stress working for the good of the people, the world, and others, they also tend to inspire a mindset that is actually more devoted to the idea than the people. In one PEANUTS comic strip, Linus says, "I love mankind. It's just people I can't stand." So, he doesn't mind being altruistic in the IDEA of serving mankind but he doesn't really care for people. This explains why communists were willing to kill so many and/or sacrifice their own lives. Though there was an element of working for other people, they were all fanatically devoted to the idea of 'mankind', 'justice', 'laws of history', etc. So, it didn't trouble them that they killed millions in the idea of saving mankind since the idea mattered more. In Chantal Akerman's(lesbian-Jewish radical and the worst filmmaker of all time)FROM THE EAST, she waxes tragic-poetic about the formerly communist Eastern Europe. But she's not bemoaning the fact that communism killed tens of millions but that it failed despite its great moral beauty. She isn't saddened by the graves of millions but the grave of the idea, for which so many 'idealistic' leftists sacrificed their lives in the name of serving 'humanity' and 'progress'.
Idealtruism also exists on the Christian Right. Some of them will sacrifice their careers, good name, money, and freedom to save unborn babies or starving Africans/Haitians(by bringing them to the US). They sincerely believe they are serving mankind, but does it really do us any good to have underclass women have more kids(many of whom are gonna turn out to be tax-burdens on all of us and/or criminals)? And is it good for most Americans if we accept boatloads of African and Haitian refugees in BLIND SIDE fashion? But Christian fanatics support insane ideas like those because they think they're serving GOD. Never mind the real negative impact it has on society. 'Serving God'--or their idea of it--matters more.
And Hinduism too says a lot about justice, morality, and being helpful to other people, but it also has lots of taboos, customs, and 'spiritual cleanliness' stuff. In the movie DHARM, a Hindu priest comes to adopt and dearly love an orphan boy considered to be a Hindu. But when it turns out he's of Muslim birth, the priest freaks out. His devotion to humanity is secondary to his devotion to spiritual tenets... at least initially.
2. Dualtruism. This is a tricky kind of altruism where one practices or shows off altruism to really serve one's own interests. We saw this with Rove's wooing of Hispanics. Rove made a show of caring for Hispanics not because he really cared about Hispanics but in order to win them over to the Republican side.
ReplyDeleteAnd Jews do a lot of this. Jews donate to non-Jewish causes partly because they want to spread a positive image of Jews. It used to be we only saw Catholic and Christian hospitals, but now we see Jewish hospitals popping up all over. This isn't to say dualtruists are purely cynical or calculating, but their professed selflessness could really be a roundabout way of
self-servingness. Maybe 'selfish' is the wrong term. It's more like selfist or selfism. But maybe, better self than serf.
When a major earthquake hit Pakistan several yrs ago, Americans went in big not only to help out--which was genuine enough--but also to promote its image in that part of the world as 'good guys'. A classic case of dualtruism.
3. Banaltruism. It's like the saying 'the banality of evil'. So, the banality of altruism or al. Altruism traditionally carried with it a sense of specialness, higher sacrifice, greater good, loftier morality. It wasn't something practiced or could be practiced by most people--who were too occupied with just getting by(even in rich nations). But, altruism has now become banal. You no longer have to go live with poor natives and be infected with leprosy. You no longer have to devote your life to feeding and helping orphans. All you gotta do is go to a Live Aid concert and rock n roll, and by golly, you saved some African kids. In the 90s, a deadhead I knew used to drive all around the country to see the band. He was an extreme environmentalist, so I asked him about all the greenhouse gases he was putting into the air. He said not to worry. By purchasing dead concert tickets, he was giving money to the band that was buying up jungles in the Amazons to save from evil corporations. So, he was actually saving the planet by following the dead.
Or, we can take advice from Sally Struthers and donate 25 cents a day to feed, educated, vaccinate, etc, etc, some kid in Guatemala.
How easy and banal it has all become.
"The point remains, prestige = majority Anglo-European males, and the more Anglo the better."
ReplyDeleteMaybe in the past. Back then, Jews wanted to marry into Wasp families. Today, Wasps wish to marry into Jewish families and be a member of Jewish 'clubs'. And lots of wasps are taking up Chinese. Too bad Chinese isn't a pretty lanugage.
"Asians are completely unable to lead."
ReplyDeleteBut many are eager to follow, so you only need a few willing to lead.
"It's been general human behavior that when a 'Market Dominant Minority' tends to lord things over the natives."
ReplyDeleteThough overseas Chinese made lots of money in SE ASia, Brazil, and the US, they never figured out a way or even wanted to LORD over native majorities. One exception is Singapore, but then Overseas Chinese are the majority in that city-state and rather tolerant of non-Chinese.
Jews, otoh, have tried to 'lord' over majority gentiles.. but this is true mainly in the West. Though Middle East Jews economically did better than Muslims, I don't think they tried to LORD over the Muslims. It was well understood by all that the Muslim world was the Muslim world.
But why were Western Jews so different? Higher intelligence? Greater social/political freedom in the West? Great individualism in the West, allowing people like Freud and Marx to develop their own theories? Greater financial/economic opportunities which made Jews not only wealthier than goyim but superduper wealthier than goyim? The progressive/contrarian/rebellious spirit that Jews picked up from gentile revolutionaries--like in the French Revolution and the revolution of 1848?
The intersting thing about Jews is how they were able to maintain a cohesive Jewish community for so long. It's been said of Jewish Marxists that they always found something to argue and bicker about. So, there wasn't just the Trotskyite school but many sects of Trotskyite schools... until every Jewish leftist created his own school of Marxism, with only HIMSELF as its member. It's like, "I wanna belong to a club that would only have me as a member." Given this Jewish tendency, you'd expect the Jews to have historically broken apart into endless bickering tribes or sects, much more than the various sects in Islam and Christianity--Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant(Methodist, Baptist, Mormon, etc). But Jews, for the most part, remained part of a close-knit community. If Jewish leftists later were unable to create a common united front--being too busy splitting hairs over theory--, why were Jews able to maintain a common spiritual/social unity and identity for through 1000s of yrs? Because it was small and united by blood? Because of goy hostility, which pushed the Jewish community together? Because each Jewish personality, no matter how independent and contrarian, had to bow down before Yahweh, the one and only God? Maybe God was the clue. But once Jews went secular and were no longer bound by God, each Jewish intellectual thought he or she knew best. Since there was no longer any God above them, each Jewish intellectual could believe his idea, explanation, or solution was THE answer to everything. Marx on the left, Rand on the 'right'.
Given this monomaniacal-individualism among many Jews, maybe the Jewish intellectual and moral community would have fractured into a thousand little pieces(making Jews susceptible to divide-and-rule by clever goyim)but for the fact of the Holocaust.
Before the Holocaust, there were many divisions between assimilationist Jews, Zionist Jews, socialist Jews, Trotksyite Jews, pro-Stalin Jews, capitalist Jews, Eastern Jews, Western Jews, blonde Jews, hairy Jews, Jewish converts to Christianity, etc. And they couldn't agree on much of anything. But the Holocaust became like the new God, a glue to pull the Jewish community into one entity despite the out-of-control egos.
So, if traditional Jews were bickering Jews held together by God and if secular Jews before the Holocaust were bickering Jews going in different directions, the postwar bickering Jews came together thanks to the common devotion to the Holocaust Faith.
Hitler really messed things up.
When you join the military, you aren't fighting for your country. You're becoming the pawn of a cynical and callous politician.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to fight for your community, become a cop and lock up local bad guys.
When you join the military, you aren't fighting for your country. You're becoming the pawn of a cynical and callous politician.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to fight for your community, become a cop and lock up local bad guys.
"If Whites would stop applying to and attending name-brand universities, their appeal to Asians and Jews would eventually lessen."
ReplyDeleteThat's a good what if. But whites aren't that united. Who will the lead whites that tell other whites to stop appying to Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Oxford. Who? Whiskey?
I'm Asian. I can't stand Amy Chua. So there.
ReplyDelete"This is pretty much the best iSteve comment thread ever. Great comments from Sherwood Smith, Sheila, asdfsfdf, Svigor, Mitch, even Whiskey was superb, with not a Truth comment in sight."
ReplyDeleteWell, we can't let that injustice stand, can we, Sport?
"You got that part right, though. Losing is always easier than trying to win."
Oh would you stop it Svigor; it's HBD, it's absolute, and it's written in the genes, now just learn how to say "Yes sir, no sir" in a few Asian languages, and take heart, in 20 years, Hollywood will make a spate of movies about a poor, feckless boy from "your side of the tracks" marrying a beautiful Chinese girl from 'Uptown'.
Anonymous who uses the word "cuz" all the time, would you *please* write a book?
ReplyDeleteThrough the magic of the internet, you could even self-publish.
I don't know how many copies you'd sell, but at least your taxes won't have to pay for a joint replacement on my forefinger, worn out from scrolling past your logorrhea
"I don't know how many copies you'd sell, but at least your taxes won't have to pay for a joint replacement on my forefinger, worn out from scrolling past your logorrhea"
ReplyDeleteClick 'collapse all comments'
The sad fate of a deer dad.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.break.com/index/crazy-deer-attacks-fat-guy.html
Oh would you stop it Svigor; it's HBD, it's absolute, and it's written in the genes, now just learn how to say "Yes sir, no sir" in a few Asian languages, and take heart, in 20 years, Hollywood will make a spate of movies about a poor, feckless boy from "your side of the tracks" marrying a beautiful Chinese girl from 'Uptown'.
ReplyDeleteI know, right? He'll get to sit in the big house with massa and drink mint juleps. Served by a poor boy from your side of the tracks.
:D
In the future the Chinese will not ask you for something, they will demand and your little white boys and girls you trained to serve will give them everything they demand; with a smile and proper fear your daughters will bow to their Chinese husbands.
ReplyDeleteYou've been out of the country too long, Sherwood. That, or they're putting something in your Baijiu.
Why is the art of music required to endure the ill-informed antics of such inartistic imbeciles as Amy Chua? Her lust for fame as an old-fashioned stage mother of either a famous violinist (yet another mechanical Sarah Chang?) or a famous pianist (yet another mechanical Lang Lang?) shines through what she perceives as devotion to the cultivation of the cultural sensitivities of her two unfortunate daughters.
ReplyDeleteDaughter Lulu at age 7 is unable to play compound rhythms from Jacques Ibert with both hands coordinated? Leonard Bernstein couldn’t conduct this at age 50! And he isn’t the only musician of achievement with this-or-that shortcoming. We all have our closets with doors that are not always fully opened.
And why all this Chinese obsession unthinkingly dumped on violin and piano? What do the parents with such insistence know of violin and piano repertoire? Further, what do they know of the great body of literature for flute? For French horn? For organ? For trumpet? Usually, nothing!
For pressure-driven (not professionally-driven!) parents like Amy Chua their children, with few exceptions, will remain little more than mechanical sidebars to the core of classical music as it’s practiced by musicians with a humanistic foundation.
Professor Chua better be socking away a hefty psychoreserve fund in preparation for the care and feeding of her two little lambs once it becomes clear to them both just how empty and ill-defined with pseudo-thorough grounding their emphasis has been on so-called achievement.
Read more about this widespread, continuing problem in Forbidden Childhood (N.Y., 1957) by Ruth Slenczynska.
________________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.