To avoid inflaming his liberal critics, Charles Murray specifically states that he won't talk about illegal immigration in discussing the state of changes in the white working class over the last 50 years. Fortunately, Ross Douthat in the NYT points out how unrealistic this is:
Third, if we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.
This aside, the debate over the white working class has have been a little surreal, with Murray, who grew up in Newton, Iowa and clearly retains a natural degree of loyalty, and who now lives in a rural town, is being attacked for insensitivity to the white working class by NYC-DC pundits who wouldn't live amongst the white working class if you paid them to.
I see the shapes,
I remember from maps.
I see the shoreline.
I see the whitecaps.
A baseball diamond, nice weather down there.
I see the school and the houses where the kids are.
Places to park by the fac'tries and buildings.
Restaunts and bar for later in the evening.
Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas.
And I have learned how these things work together.
I see the parkway that passes through them all.
And I have learned how to look at these things and I say,
(CHORUS)
I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I couldn't live there if you paid me to.
I guess it's healthy, I guess the air is clean.
I guess those people have fun with their neighbors and friends.
Look at that kitchen and all of that food.
Look at them eat it' guess it tastes real good.
They grow it in the farmlands
And they take it to the stores
They put it in the car trunk
And they bring it back home
And I say ...
(CHORUS)
I say, I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to.
I'm tired of looking out the windows of the airplane
I'm tired of travelling, I want to be somewhere.
It's not even worth talking
About those people down there.
David Byrne, Talking Heads, "The Big Country," 1978
Posts
68 comments:
"Immigration benefits the economy overall"
An oft-repeated claim, but a claim without any substantial evidence or analysis to back it up at all.
Firstly, I would love someone to produce a correlation regression analysis of immigrant penetration by per cent of the US population and economic growth year by year.
My hunch is that you will find zero correlation, or a negative correlation.
Secondly, as I never tire of mentioning that as far as economic growth is concerned, the all important metric is productivity per capita - it is this and this alone that produces 'growth' except in 'freak' cases of resource booms.If the immigrants have lower skill and productivity than natives, then the nation gets poorer on a per capita basis (the only real measure of prosperity).
"Overall, this aside the debate over the white working class has have been a little surreal, with Murray, who lives in a rural town being attacked for insensitivity to the white working class by people who wouldn't live amongst them if you paid them to."
I find this sentence a little surreal.
It should be interesting to watch the mestizoization of the formerly white working class. Let’s hope that they all demand Affirmative Action and learn to hate whitey. The genuine Scots-Irish look to be especially vulnerable to assimilation into an “Hispanic” wiggerized underclass.
Rank-and-file conservatives/Republicans are such mental-defectives it's not even funny...
Douthat strikes me as the most "on point" conservative pundit. He gets the drug war policies probably undermined crime, but needs to be changed because it lead to a prison society, and is correct when he talks about how the right has completely forgotten about how to help the white working class males that vote for them.
The new feminism.
Douthat's solutions:
1)lower SS tax. But SS for the working poor is already offset by EIC.
2) Increase child tax credit and increase Family Leave requirements.
3) stop low skill immigration. Agree.
3) Increase arrests to decrease imprisonment. HUH?
Score: 1/4 useful.
RE: Charles Murray
read this: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/what-to-do-about-coming-apart/
Read the critique at the end.
The white American underclass has been created by many of the same trends that created the British underclass: deindustrialization and loss of high-wage work, increasing real estate prices and decreasing "affordable family formation" for everyone, anti-family welfare policies, pop culture, changing social mores, more competition in the labor market from immigrants.
Many are unaware just how much alcoholism, addiction, family breakdown, property crime, and poverty are in plenty of predominately white rural areas. No you won't get shot by the Crips and the Bloods, but you'll encounter a fair number of marginally employed substance abusers and are at risk of theft from meth heads.
There are even some white urban areas which have tipped from working class into the underclass. Mostly around the rustbelt (Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Jackson, Flint, upstate NY, Baltimore, Scioto County, etc). Charles Murray's industrially decaying Fishtown, which is based on a white neighborhood in Philadelphia, has a crime rate almost 4x the national average.
I have an idea. How about Mexicans take all of California, and white Californians take all of Mexico.
Murray's "working-class" rural town has a median household income significantly higher than the national average: http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2012/02/more-on-charles-murrays-assertion-that.html
We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.
the super wealthy who fund and own the new york times won't like the latter, and graduate degree class who reads the new york times, if they are smart, won't like the former.
I can do Murray one better -- I'm going to write a book about terrorism that doesn't mention Islam.
Or maybe a book about racial differences that doesn't talk about evolution.
"We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants"
Maybe. But it's a kick in the teeth to American kids who put their nose to the grindstone and graduate with a difficult degree in a STEM field, only to find that low-wage immigrant competition has percolated all the way up the technical tree.
He writes that "Immigration benefits the economy over all", when there's scant evidence that it actually does.
That aside, it's a good article. There are a lot of faux conservatives writing for the MSM - David Brooks, for instance - but Douthat has always stuck me as the real deal and being perfectly willing to take shots at both libertarians and liberals. And in the pages of the NYT, no less.
I can't imagine that loss of decent jobs, whether through off-shoring or by importing cheap foreign labor to take the jobs that can't be off-shored, isn't a big contributing factor in pushing down the white working class. It doesn't take too long either.
I live in SW Virginia. About 5 years ago when things started downhill, a Volvo plant nearby laid off a bunch of workers. These folks were making $20+ an hour with decent benefits. Down here that's good money. You can live very well, especially if your spouse also has a reasonably decent job and you've been more or less prudent in your personal life.
Last year, Volvo started calling back some workers. Great news!! However, a surprising number couldn't be hired back because they couldn't pass the drug test. The likelihood of their finding anything that could touch those wages plus benefits are slim. Volvo, of course, had no problem filling those jobs with others.
The amazing thing is, these guys were clean when they worked for Volvo and it isn't as if Volvo dropped by their house unexpectedly to give them a pre-hire-back drug test. They knew what was coming.
It's just like the young women I see at social services and emergency assistance where I do some volunteer work. They can barely take care of themselves and they have two stair-step children and are pregnant with their third.
These people may not be dumber than their parents and grandparents, but, boy, do they lack judgement, and you don't get that at college!!
Murray lives in a rural town that is part of the DC metro census area and is six miles from a commuter train station.
I have seen excerpts from Murray's book that claim working class income has not changed since 1960 and a blue collar man can still support a family. I think this conflicts with Steve's articles on affordable family foundation. Steve you should compare white marriage rates in affordable areas to expensive ones.
"We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants"
Absolutely! We should bring in thousands of Indian and Pakistani journalists with cheap visas to replace the likes of Douthat and Brooks. They can work for a third of their pay.
Next should be lawyers, university teachers and medical doctors.
Finally, companies could save millions of dollars by firing uppity native CEO´s and hiring (East and South) Asian executives.
Why should only entry level US jobs be enriched by diversity?
Let´s see the upper middle-class get a taste of its own medicine.
"Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities"
So the economy overall is not constituted of communities where people live and work? What is the element that accounts for the alleged net positive? Corporate stocks are up?
"Wages are lower and communities are disrupted, but Wall Street is making a killing - the economy is sound, baby!"
Or maybe what is meant is that the communities without much or any illegal immigration are holding on to good wages and cohesion well enough to make up the losses elsewhere? Seems an unlikely interpretation.
>It should be interesting to watch the mestizoization of the formerly white working class.>
This has been going on for years. A trend in country music (played everywhere the white working class is) is hispanic-boosting songs. One recent love song in heavy rotation for a few years (and still there) is all about a white working guy hankering or jonesing after a seniorita who don't speak English. "I don't know what she said, but I love the way she said it..." croons the neck suggestively. Country music, of course, is mostly produced by good ol' Nashville white boys from LA with solidly Scots-Irish backgrounds. (I have met a few of these characters - maybe more on that later.)
>I have seen excerpts from Murray's book that claim working class income has not changed since 1960 and a blue collar man can still support a family.<
If you are right about those excerpts, then the book has a fundamental flaw.
"So the economy overall is not constituted of communities where people live and work?"
?? You inserted a universal quantified in there. Please check yo logik.
Immigration benefits the economy over all,...
He had to say that I guess. But I think this is open to question, e.g. Borjas et al.
...but it can lower wages and disrupt communities,...
Nice of him to mention that. Not only "can" it do that, it does do that. Perhaps that's as close as the media can get -- in a story that's not about the census -- to acknowledging the wholesale demographic change that massive immigration is bringing about in America.
But as long as it's economically beneficial...
It's a bit curious that people who give hardly a second thought to the demographic destruction of America get really upset about drilling for oil in the Arctic.
I'm not sure that I understand what David is saying.
The white working class takes their cues from what they hear in Country music songs.
The lyrics of country music songs encourage miscegenation.
The people that write these lyrics live in Nashville.
The people that write these lyrics who live in Nashville are thus responsible for the founding stock americans who decide to miscegenate
Anyone else see the flaws in this logic?
David: You left out an important detail about that song (recorded by one Blaine Larsen - I don't know the ethnicity of the songwriters) - it is set in Mexico, not the United States. That is also true of other songs of this type - George Strait's "The Beaches of Old Mexico" puts it right there in the title.
Anyway, the charms of Mexican women have been a theme of country songs for years, at least as far back as Marty Robbins's classic "El Paso." (And that one actually was set in the U.S. - of course, it was also set in the nineteenth century.)
Rank-and-file conservatives/Republicans are such mental-defectives it's not even funny..
Hey, all we have to do is buy FOX News and make PJB the CEO. Of course, based on some past experiences, there would be a big drop in advertising revenue and a lot of cable operators
would drop the network.
>?? You inserted a universal quantified in there. Please check yo logik.<
You mean Douthat's "it can" vs. my (implied) "it does"? Nonsense. It does. Douthat is playing coy here. Wrt what he's talking about (= wages and community cohesion) I wager anything there is no good case he could show that immigration INCREASES native wages or native community cohesion. No 3rd position possible because implicit in the terms of the discussion is that immigration has an effect good or bad.
From Edsall's review:
"Mead’s . . . reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries — a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially “intractable.” Mead’s way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murray’s, it is also more on target."
How can an adult write approvingly of "a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially "intractable"?
The HBD debate operates on two levels: 1) the HBD level, where everyone agrees that genes matter (whether they admit it publicly or not), and 2) the practical level, where we all agree that genetic fatalism is morally corrosive. By confusing 1) with 2), and denouncing the proponents of 1) as advocates of 2), all further debate is effectively squashed.
Mercer: I have seen excerpts from Murray's book that claim working class income has not changed since 1960 and a blue collar man can still support a family.
Well, I haven't read Murray's stupid book, but I'm *extremely* skeptical of the reality of this claim.
Let's use a little common sense. Back in 1960, a large fraction of the working-class was employed in very well-paid auto industry and other industrial jobs, and these have been devastated. Meanwhile, the wages of other once-well paid jobs in construction have been greatly reduced due to immigrant competition. Finally, the private sector unions, which had kept those wages high, have been almost completely annihilated. I think about the only really well-paid working-class jobs left are the elite public sector ones such as police or fire departments.
Probably Murray is playing games with statistics, and comparing two-income blue collar households of today with one-income blue collar households of 1960. But that completely ignores the huge additional family costs incurred when wives enter the workforce. And I'm sure Murray's also leaving out the enormous rise on the expense side of the family budget ledger, including health care and education. Elizabeth Warren has a great YouTube lecture covering most of these issues that can be found on the Internet.
I think it's pretty obvious that Murray's just a dishonest shill, who sings for his supper.
A solid critique (earlier post):
“Coming Apart,” with its emphasis on the “demoralization” of white working-class America, has received exuberant praise and brutal criticism. Despite his emphasis on morale, Murray demonstrates an insensitivity to the psychologically debilitating effects of the disappearance of decent-paying manufacturing and production jobs for those who are not college-educated, and the painful sense of status dislocation that haunts those who are cast off. He makes almost no reference to the past 40 years of deindustrialization or globalization. He does write that “insofar as men need to work to survive — an important proviso — falling hourly income does not discourage work.”
--
Murray damages his credibility as part ideologue when he ignores declining stable incomes.
Do pundits like Douhat really believe the "high skilled" immigration BS, or is it just a qualifier so they won't get called racist?
Because anyone who is in these "high skilled" industries knows full well the people coming here on H1-Bs are not high skilled at all--they are overwhelmingly performing simple technical tasks that anyone with half a brain can do. These people are not job creators, period.
STEM grads and professionals are headed for Fishtown.
Right, seductive senoritas were a big deal in country when it was called "country & western" -- Marty Robbins' El Paso (which, I believe, one the first Grammy for Record of the Year) being the classic example.
I have seen excerpts from Murray's book that claim working class income has not changed since 1960 and a blue collar man can still support a family
The median male worker (not to be confused with the mean or average male worker) makes almost exactly the same, after adjusting for inflation, as he did in 1973.
But since the costs of many basic commodities have gone up at a rate greater than that of inflation, he is worse off off today.
(Note that the standard inflation rate does not include the cost of food and energy)
"They can barely take care of themselves and they have two stair-step children and are pregnant with their third."
I've never heard that expression, and I am one as my brother and I are 18 months apart. This was extremely common in the late 1950s.
Well, the Scotch-Irish in parts of the mountain south seem to have a lot of Cherokee and Creek in them so I guess breeding with Mexicans wouldn't be too different.
anyone who is in these "high skilled" industries knows full well the people coming here on H1-Bs are not high skilled at all--they are overwhelmingly performing simple technical tasks that anyone with half a brain can do. These people are not job creators, period.
Amen to that. My sense is that the great mass of people who work outside of tech are under the mistaken impression that there exists some crippling shortage of tech workers. Nothing could be further from the case.
"We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants"
Maybe. But it's a kick in the teeth to American kids who put their nose to the grindstone and graduate with a difficult degree in a STEM field, only to find that low-wage immigrant competition has percolated all the way up the technical tree.
Yeah. In theory "high-skilled immigrants" is a broad term. In practice it means some very specific skills - engineers and computer programmers - are to be imported in large quantities from some very specific parts of the world. It does NOT mean we're going to import tens of thousands of European journalists to drive down the wages of the current crop of lefty lick-spittles, for example. If it did mean that then our journo's might reconsider their belief that more high-skilled immigrants are a blessing to us all.
"Despite his emphasis on morale, Murray demonstrates an insensitivity to the psychologically debilitating effects of the disappearance of decent-paying manufacturing and production jobs for those who are not college-educated, and the painful sense of status dislocation that haunts those who are cast off."
Germans went through hell in WWII but didn't become trash after the war. 15 million Ost-Germans were uprooted, up to 2 million died, and they resettled in Western Germany with only clothes on their back.
Americans suffered far greater economic duress in the 30s. Yet they didn't become trash.
Blacks suffered discrimination and poverty for a long time, but their family was intact until the 60s.
Chinese went through hell during Warlord period, WWII, Civil War, Great Leap, and Cultural Revolution but they're working to build new China.
While it's true that there has been economic hard times for poor whites in UK and US, what explains the total cultural and moral rot?
El Paso.
The recent surprising results that Hispanics live longer than whites. perhaps because Hispanic women don't smoke or drink and do a good job of raising their children.
Perhaps marriages between Hispanic women and the real Scots Irish might not be dysfunctional after all.
Robert Hume
Well, the Scotch-Irish in parts of the mountain south seem to have a lot of Cherokee and Creek in them so I guess breeding with Mexicans wouldn't be too different.
BIG myth - google the 'indian princess myth" - johnny cash for example thought he was irish and cherokee - when he did a geneolgy search turns out he was nearly 100% scottish, no injun blood.
Steve Sailer said... Right, seductive senoritas were a big deal in country when it was called "country & western"
Not just country-western--don't forget Brian Wilson's "Mexican Girl."
H1-Bs are primarily taken by two countries.
India and the UK
H1-B is essential for Wall Street.
Highly skilled workers is an umbrella term not just for H1-B.
It's commonly assumed to include foreign graduate students in the sciences and medical workers.
"we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well"
Holy crap!
Common sense, at the NYT?
Have I misjudged them?
Byrne was from Glasgow, right? There's a Scot who's shtick has not aged well. Several their music videos were "satires" of "consumerism" - compare/contrast with the latest Hype Williams production of the cognac distillery housed on a gold-plated yacht
"I say, I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to."
Are you sure the song isn't "Fly over Country'?
Oh wait, that's Jason Aldean's song:
"A couple guys in first class on a flight
From new York to Los Angeles,
Kinda making small talk killing time,
Flirting with the flight attendants,
30, 000 feet above, could be Oklahoma,
Just a bunch of square cornfields and wheat farms,
Man it all looks the same,
Miles and miles of back roads and highways,
Connecting little towns with funny names,
Who'd want to live down there in the middle of nowhere,
They've never drove through Indiana,
Met the man who plowed that earth,
Planted that seed, busted his ass for you and me,
Or caught a harvest moon in Kansas,
They'd understand why god made those fly over states,
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/j/jason_aldean/fly_over_states.html ]
I bet that mile long Santa Fe freight train engineer's seen it all
Just like that flatbed cowboy stacking US steel on a 3-day haul
Road and rails under their feet
Yeah that sounds like a first class seat
On the plains of Oklahoma
With a windshield sunset in your eyes
Like a watercolor painted sky
Where like a water color painted sky
You'd think heavens doors have opened
You'll understand why god made
Those fly over states
Take a ride across the badlands
Feel that freedom on your face
Breathe in all that open space
Meet a girl from Amarillo
You'll understand why god made
You might even wanna plant your stakes
In those fly over states, yeah
Have you ever been through Indiana
On the plains of Oklahoma
Take a ride"
Songwriters: DULANEY, MICHAEL WILLIAM / THRASHER, NEIL
It does NOT mean we're going to import tens of thousands of European journalists to drive down the wages of the current crop of lefty lick-spittles, for example. If it did mean that then our journo's might reconsider their belief that more high-skilled immigrants are a blessing to us all.
Don't be so sure. Being a useful idiot means the crocodile eats you last, not that you don't get eaten at all.
My wife works as a proofreader. Recently, there's been a trend in the industry at farming out "low-level" copyediting and proofreading to workers overseas and paying them pennies on the dollar.
Most of these new outsourced employees don't speak good English, and some don't speak any at all. Instead, they go by a series of instructions and rules that they recognize by sight, without comprehending what the mistake in the text is or why they're changing it. This process must take a great deal longer than native-speaker recognition and comprehension, but clearly the extra time is outweighed by the greatly reduced wages.
This kind of thing is getting more common (see sites like this one about outsourcing writing to India, and note the 'diversity' shout-out in the title: http://www.outsource2india.com/why_india/articles/writing.diversity.asp).
People in the industry are uncomfortable about getting pushed out of the market, but don't want to speak out because it makes them look racist. And of course, the bosses love it. It saves them money, and unlike other cost-cutting measures, it's almost too easy to shame anyone who complains ("you don't appreciate diversity!" "what have you got against helping non-Americans into the middle class?") No one's going to stop it until it's too late, and they're already being lectured by the shrinking minority of Americans with good jobs about being too uppity and demanding more than $4/hour. Everyone at this level of the industry is holding back a South Park-esque "THEY TOOK OUR JERBS" moment.
Where is the Studs Terkel of the white working class? Maybe some of the elites might want to know what it is like for the whites working in fast food restaurants, as security guards, as delivery men or as cab drivers.
The bleakness of the white lower class is rarely portrayed without irony.
Statistics are bloodless. A story can imprint a image for a lifetime.
"bruce banner said...
""We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants""
"Absolutely! We should bring in thousands of Indian and Pakistani journalists with cheap visas to replace the likes of Douthat and Brooks. They can work for a third of their pay.
Next should be lawyers, university teachers and medical doctors.
Finally, companies could save millions of dollars by firing uppity native CEO´s and hiring (East and South) Asian executives.
Why should only entry level US jobs be enriched by diversity?
Let´s see the upper middle-class get a taste of its own medicine."
Was going to post, but you already said it. I would merely add this: We are not an economy that happens to have a nation. We are (or are supposed to be) a nation that has an economy.
Steve, you're wrong about Murray. He has no sympathy at all for the white working class. His whole book is an attack on the white working class that tries to deny that the loss of jobs due to neoliberal policies has anything to do with what he is describing. He is essentially a shill for the current establishment and orthodoxy.
Anonydroid said: H1-B is essential for Wall Street.
2/13/12 7:25 PM
Hunsdon replied: And Wall Street is essential to . . . the tax base of Manhattan and high end coke dealers?
As an aside, given Goldman Sachs heavy involvement in massaging Greece's number before accession into the Eurozone, how odd that there's no blowback on Goldman Sachs. How very odd indeed.
I read that David Byrne intended the song as a retort to Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music) and his advocacy of rural living. Of course, the English scene differs slightly from the American one Byrne references. Ferry like many English rock stars bought himself a modest stately pile and became part of the nouveau country gentry and practiced plenty of high living. His son prominently leads a pro-fox hunting and traditional field sports campaign group. Rural life for the wealthy in England can be classy & sophisticated whereas in America it seems to suffer from a lingering hillbilly image problem.
from Douthat
"Prison is a school for crime"
So are street corners and pool halls.
"and an anchor on advancement"
Good. Stealth eugenics ftw.
///
"Many are unaware...No you won't get shot by the Crips and the Bloods...There are even some white urban areas which have tipped from working class into the underclass. Mostly around the rustbelt...Fishtown, which is based on a white neighborhood in Philadelphia, has a crime rate almost 4x the national average."
That mirrors the UK experience, drugs, dysfunction and lots of property crime and mostly non-lethal violence. The biggest distinction with the black version is the amount of lethal and potentially lethal violence.
, it's almost too easy to shame anyone who complains ("you don't appreciate diversity!"
yep, I remember when i had a 'gold ' server contract with dell - one day i picked up the phone during an emergency and got near incomprehensible Indinglish on the other end of the line. Worse still, the only thing that was clear is that the 'tech' on the other line had never even seen a real server.
I called sales -(always the way to actually get through to a company) and got routed to 'emergency' customer complaints - when I complained i was berated by the woman on the other end "we're committed to diversity"
I called her on her BS though, and got routed to the small "a-team" of american techs. After four plus hours (this while the server was down) I got to an american tech, problem sovled in less than 20 minutes.
True story: A friend of my college-age daughter's, definitely from Fishtown, developed a heroin habit at age 20. He's a smart kid, reads Emerson and William James on his, but in a moment of stupid desperation ":held up" a convenience store with a toy gun.
He was arrested but, without a lawyer, was sentenced to one year in county jail first offense. He got out owing the state $18,000. Plus he had lost his two front teeth in a fight while in jail.
With no transportation he was forced to walk miles to work washing dishes in local restaurants at minimum wage.
A few months later he was arrested for driving without a license. This was a parole violation, so he got five more months in the slammer.
Now he is 22, off drugs, but is virtually unemployable because of his record. He's going to the local community college where he studies liberal arts and is, so far, $1800 in dept to the school. He has to bum rides or walk miles wherever he goes. He's fit -- was a championship boxer in high school -- and reasonably good looking except for the teeth. No one will hire him.
He comes to me as a mentor. What can I do.? I'm an old man. All I can do is advise him: To learn a trade instead of studying English; join a Baptist church to find a girl friend (belief is not the issue), and go to the local newspaper in the hopes that his story will be told.
If he climbs out of the hole he is in it will be a gigantic achievement. My knees buckle at the thought. Otherwise he'll be back in jail I imagine, at God know what cost to the state.
"While it's true that there has been economic hard times for poor whites in UK and US, what explains the total cultural and moral rot?"
Short answer: modern liberalism.
People of the middle and upper classes were no longer expected to hide their bad behavior and people of the lower classes were no longer expected to emulate the good behavior of their betters.
People were also encouraged to express themselves rather than repress themselves. The primacy, even the supremacy, of the individual was trumpeted unceasingly. When everybody is a somebody, then nobody has any reason to behave better than anybody.
Respectability, neatness, dress appropriate to the occasion, good work habits, intact families, the uncomplaining assumption of one's personal and social responsibilities were all disparaged as risible and undesirable holdovers from the repressive and racist 1950's (and earlier, of course, but the 50s really lent themselves to the left's condemnation and ridicule).
The whole thing has been awful, which, I suspect, was the left's intent all along.
R** K. U**'s incessant & proudly ignorant attacks on Charles Murray (the former always makes a point of the fact that he hasn't read the latter and doesn't plan to) never cease to freak me out.
And of course, the bosses love it. It saves them money, and unlike other cost-cutting measures, it's almost too easy to shame anyone who complains
There may be other reasons why the bosses love it. Hiring "diverse" peoples is a shiny boy scout badge for them, and these "diverse" people are obedient and have great social skills (whatever that means) - rather than white nerds, geeks, and weirdos.
"An oft-repeated claim, but a claim without any substantial evidence or analysis to back it up at all."
Da Comrade, everyone knows that communism will lead the new soviet man forward, that said I have some concerns...
Vinteuil: incessant & proudly ignorant attacks on Charles Murray (the former always makes a point of the fact that he hasn't read the latter and doesn't plan to) never cease to freak me out.
Look, Murray has a long track-record, and that track-record shows him to be an incompetent and a shill. When you're the most prominent public figure writing about extremely serious and controversial topics, this is a huge problem. Let me cite a few examples.
Back in late 1980s, I read Murray's anti-Welfare "Losing Ground," which I thought was quite good. Obviously, I noticed he'd left out any mention of the absolutely crucial HBD/IQ role and framed his entire critique in Ayn Randian terms, but I certainly didn't blame him. After all, authors need to eat, don't they?
But then after his big IQ book "The Bell Curve" came out, he was asked about that in an interview, and claimed that when Losing Ground came out, he'd been totally ignorant of IQ/HBD, and never dreamed it was a factor in anything until Herrnstein had contacted him, and unfortunately, I tend to believe him. Herrnstein/Jensen/etc. had published their stuff in the late 1960s and had gotten *massive* media attention, yet Murray had spent decades as a professional social scientist focusing on welfare/underclass type issues, and had never heard of any of that research. This is not a good sign.
Next, Murray's Bell Curve book was extremely long and full but not very good and got lots of things confused. Anyway, it didn't really say much that his co-author Herrnstein (a very serious scholar) hadn't already indicated 25 years earlier back in 1969. In fact, I suspect Murray was really just writing up and popularizing Herrnstein's research, which he didn't fully understand in depth, and this turned out to be a *huge* problem since Herrnstein died just as the book came out. I remember seeing Murray on some TV show getting hostile questions from opposing scholars, and he didn't really handle himself very well, since Herrnstein wasn't around to pass him the answers.
Recall also that Murray claimed that for IQ-deterministic reasons there would be a *gigantic* growth in the national white underclass, just as disorderly and violent as the existing black urban underclass, and therefore by now all our cities would have become deadly no-go ghetto zones on the way to American "custodial democracy." Instead, crime has since totally collapsed nationwide.
Afterwards, he mostly wrote silly libertarian books to impress his silly libertarian friends and paymasters, notably proposing to solve our social problems by having the government annually distribute $10,000 worth of free crack, er, I mean $10,000 in *cash* to everyone living in ghettos. He generally avoided IQ issues, except for a long article a few years ago in Commentary, in which he endlessly praised the unimaginable genius of the Jewish Race, and (as I recall) suggested that one major proof that the Jews possessed the most brilliant minds in history was that they had discovered the only true religion. Presumably, Murray wanted to have his stipend raised so he could buy a fancier house.
There's a substanial white underclass in America. It tends to be spread out and less visible, but it's substanial enough in size. Go to any small town and you'll encounter plenty of whites who drink too much, get involved with meth or oxycontin, and have problems with the law. It's not comparable to the black underclass, but it's depressing to look at these people.
The tendency of underclass whites to not form urban slums reduces the attention they receive, but there are more white slums then you might think. The rustbelt (Baltimore, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit) has its share of high crime white hoods.
That mirrors the UK experience, drugs, dysfunction and lots of property crime and mostly non-lethal violence. The biggest distinction with the black version is the amount of lethal and potentially lethal violence.
Yes. In the US, Lower-income rural white areas have quite a bit of drugs, alcoholism, dysfunction, and property crime. Lower-income urban white slums have all those issues and also major problems with violent crime (assault, robbery, rape) and social breakdown (not working, broken families, etc). However, random lethal violence (shootings, stabbings, murders) is not too problematic. It does tend to occur at an unreasonably elevated rate in urban white slums, but it's not so absurdly high that the neighborhood becomes a war zone.
White urban slums can match up to black slums in dysfunctionality and breakdown. They can surpass black areas in drug (meth, oxycontin) and alcohol abuse (trust me). For whatever reason, though, horrendous levels of lethal violence don't seem to go through the roof, except in rare situations (South Boston and southwest Detroit come to mind). Some have attributed this to the widespread use of crack cocaine in the black areas, but maybe genetic factors are at work too.
The worst aspect of the white urban slums is that they're falling apart. The people, the buildings, the community, the economy, etc. For the white rural areas, the situation is milder, but not good either. As our recession goes, and immigration continues unabated, maybe things will get worse. Take a trip through south Ohio (especially Portsmouth) to see what our future could look like. It might shock you.
There is a terrible day of reckoning coming..Vae Victis
Luke Lea
"He comes to me as a mentor. What can I do?"
I think the trade advice was good.
What about motorbikes, scooters, mopeds - are they all covered the same?
///
anon
"They can surpass black areas in drug (meth, oxycontin) and alcohol abuse (trust me)."
Yeah, much more self-destructive for the sheer hell of it.
"For whatever reason, though, horrendous levels of lethal violence don't seem to go through the roof...but maybe genetic factors are at work too."
I think it's partly due to this:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090605123237.htm
In my time i thought i noticed a specific type who wasn't exactly more impulsively violent - if anything slightly less - but when they were violent they'd aim to kill whereas normal people mostly don't. Also they seem to get high from it whereas normal people mostly go into a kind of shock afterwards.
Unless i imagined it the points made in the article are a prety good fit to that type.
"Go to any small town and you'll encounter plenty of whites who drink too much, get involved with meth or oxycontin, and have problems with the law. It's not comparable to the black underclass, but it's depressing to look at these people."
Drinking too much? Are you kidding me? Most people will drink too much when they drink if they aren't part of a religion prohibiting alcohol use. Historically whites have used various popular drugs like laudanum and snuff as well as the still legal tobacco and alcohol. What you mean by "problems with the law" probably varies demographically but you'd be surprised at how many people have legal troubles of various kinds. Even matters associated with divorce settlements can keep a person eternally in the midst of some legal proceeding or other. As usual, you remain ignorant so you can make sweeping statements that don't ring true though they sound good enough to you.
"I'm not sure that I understand what David is saying.
The white working class takes their cues from what they hear in Country music songs.
The lyrics of country music songs encourage miscegenation.
The people that write these lyrics live in Nashville.
The people that write these lyrics who live in Nashville are thus responsible for the founding stock americans who decide to miscegenate
Anyone else see the flaws in this logic?"
I think you missed the 'Scotch-Irish' inside joke there. He isn't saying they are written by people who live in Nashville, and that country music in general is not controlled by the kind of people that are usually considered genre fans.
More to the point if you actually manage to matriculate through Nashville's country music subculture it's as much a left-wing hugbox as Hollywood, and the people on top are a lot more likely to be from LA or NYC than anywhere in 'flyover country', with all of the associated pejorative views that my fellow coast dwellers have of people that listen to country music.
Look.
Dysfunctional, trashy whites have ALWAYS existed in the USA even in the 'golden age' of the 1950s, from way back when the colonies were first settled and of course including Boston's and NYC's notorious Irish.
Most readers growing up, must have encountered these types.Typically there were wracked by drink, wife and child abuse, untidiness and a lot of petty crime and general nastiness - but, mind you, nothing absoultely horrible like you see in black ghettoes or the general dysfunction of mexicans.
Many of them died prematurely as alcoholics.Many spent live in and out of prison, but a goodly number found a niche in society - generally doing manual labor and prospered and put their past behind.A few over the generations broke into 'respectability' and high incomes.
My point these people are nothing new, they have always existed and always will exist, they are part of the general flora and fauna and IQ distribution and perhaps, just perhaps they are good and necessary, otherwise who'd be the hod carriers and roofers?
He's right. Immigrants (along with outsourcing, and all other forms of corporate welfare) "help the economy".
The Economy. It's what the controllers say it is; it's what it is because of them, no?
The economy is benefited because the 1% are happy with this schema, selfsame to their constant push of it.
And the politburo only exists as echochamber.
When socialism and capitalism conflate. The New American dream.
"Dysfunctional, trashy whites have ALWAYS existed in the USA"
Of course and there'll always be a MINIMUM percentage no matter what you do. However the MAXIMUM percentage can be adjusted by both short-term and long-term policy.
A: Recently, there's been a trend in the industry at farming out "low-level" copyediting and proofreading to workers overseas and paying them pennies on the dollar.
Most of these new outsourced employees don't speak good English, and some don't speak any at all. Instead, they go by a series of instructions and rules that they recognize by sight, without comprehending what the mistake in the text is or why they're changing it.
Ah. And here I was thinking that modern publishers had dispensed with editing altogether. How nice to know they still care about the quality of their product after all.
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