May 14, 2013

Infrequently Asked Questions about Richwine kerfuffle

My new Taki's Magazine column is a Frequently Asked Questions list about the Richwine wingding. A sample:
Q. Hispanics are an ethnicity, not a race, so how can we know that the next generation of Mexican immigrants won’t be very different? 
A. I could imagine one event that would drive up new Hispanic immigrants’ children’s test scores substantially: another Revolution in Mexico. If rich white Mexicans, like the world’s richest man Carlos Slim, had to flee for their lives, the next generation of Mexican newcomers might be a lot like the prosperous Cubans who arrived in Miami after Fidel. 
But the way immigration from Mexico has been working since the end of the last Revolution almost a century ago is via family chain migration. New immigrants tend to belong to the extended families of old immigrants. 
Q. But that’s genetic determinism! 
A. Actually, it’s both nature and nurture working in tandem. If, say, a young fellow from Sinaloa moves in with his uncle in East L.A., the newcomer shares a lot, genetically and culturally, with the old-timer.

Read the whole thing there.

20 comments:

  1. San Franciscan nonmonk5/14/13, 10:09 PM

    The flight from white will begin raising hispanic IQ numbers soon.

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  2. The contents of the national myths serve to demonstrate current ethnic power. The descendants of Ellis Island-era immigrants are on top now, so they’ve rewritten history to make their ancestors sound central. This post-hoc score-settling is no doubt fun, but it’s obviously a stupid way to decide immigration policy.

    That's a great paragraph Steve. I am younger than you, but even I remember as a kid focusing more on the settler/pioneer story of the USA, not the immigrant one. And my dad is an immigrant!

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  3. Whoa, that comment I made about schmaltz really had an effect! Nice work.

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  4. @Anonymous, what Steve Sailer didn't mention is that the descendants of Ellis Island-era immigrants were on top and producing those national myths "all about cowboys and settlers, not immigrants" when he was a boy, too. And long before he was born, as well.

    So, what Steve Sailer told you is exactly wrong. The contents of the national myths do not demonstrate current ethnic power, because the same powerful ethnicity was producing the "good" contents back in the Golden Age.

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  5. Anonymous said...
    "Whoa, that comment I made about schmaltz really had an effect! Nice work."

    Indeed, it did. Thanks. -- Steve

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  6. P.S. The logic in my previous post was a little garbled, but the basic point is still true: national myths do not demonstrate which ethnie is in power.

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  7. Aaron, you're right that Ellis Island immigrants & their descendants made films propagating the cowboy/settler myths; Steve's point is that after their ascendance in American society, they started propagating their own.

    Steve's point has some truth to it, though there are some complications. Would make for an interesting essay if he fleshed this out.

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  8. Remind me to finally write this essay I've been researching on the Six Days War and the subsequent surprise super-giganto success of a certain movie a few months later.

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  9. "Americans love a winner."

    -- George S. Patton

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  10. If you mean The Graduate, and if you tie that success in with the Six Day War, cool, looking forward to reading your essay.

    I think I might have misread the sentence in the Takimag article. I thought that was about Jews being in power in Hollywood. Or maybe it was about Jews being powerful in America as a whole? But again, Jews were already influential by the time you were born. Or was it about Jews becoming socio-economically successful in America? That would certainly explain Mike Nichols' The Graduate, with its subliminally Jewish Southern California families. It would even better explain Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, a much better and more explicitly Jewish movie than The Graduate.

    But it wouldn't explain the Nichols and May Jewish comedy from the time when you were born, much less its popularity with the goyim.

    It wouldn't explain all the self-referential Jewish stuff in media almost from the beginning of Hollywood. There were more obscure Yiddish phrases in Three Stooges comedies than there are on TV today. Is The Graduate any more Jewish than the Marx Brothers comedies?

    That's why I don't think it's about Jewish ascendancy, whether in Hollywood, in politics, or simply in socio-economic class.

    But if you weren't talking about The Graduate, then, as that Jewish TV star used to say, "Never mind."

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  11. Kerfuffle? Brouhaha? Which is it, Sailer?

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  12. "Everybody has that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach that Richwine is telling the obvious truth, which doesn’t make him popular. He had to be crushed pour encourager les autres."

    Megaphone talks, truth walks.

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  13. Aaron:

    Joseph Breen has a lot to do with why the Golden Age of Hollywood was actually a Golden Age.

    http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/15299/golden-age-hollywood-censor-was-an-anti-semite-says-critic/

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  14. Aaron Gross said: Steve Sailer didn't mention is that the descendants of Ellis Island-era immigrants were on top and producing those national myths "all about cowboys and settlers, not immigrants" when he was a boy, too.

    Hunsdon replied: They weren't on top, my good fellow. The right clubs wouldn't let them in, HYPS conducted virtual pogroms against them in the undergraduate ranks. Hence cowboy and settler stories. ("An empire of their own," after all.)

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  15. Kevin Michael Grace5/15/13, 7:56 AM

    Steve, you keep saying that my country, Canada, selects the best and brightest as immigrants, but it just isn't true. According to Martin Collacott of the Fraser Institute, only about 15% of Canada's immigrants are selected on that basis. Most immigrants are self-selected and come to Canada via "family reunification," ie, chain migration.

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  16. P.S. The logic in my previous post was a little garbled, but the basic point is still true: national myths do not demonstrate which ethnie is in power.

    "Demonstrate" may be too strong. National myths, however, are certainly good evidence of which group is in power.

    So, what Steve Sailer told you is exactly wrong. The contents of the national myths do not demonstrate current ethnic power, because the same powerful ethnicity was producing the "good" contents back in the Golden Age.

    I'm not sure that the "Golden Age" contents were consistently healthy. But even if they were, that ethnicity had a lot less power in this country during the Golden Age.

    Can you provide any (other?) clear counterexamples to the view that national myths reflect which group is in power?

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  17. Steve,

    Looking forward to your essay. One question for you though: wasn't Hollywood's pro-Israel period mostly pre-1967 (e.g., Exodus, Cast A Giant Shadow)?

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  18. "Aaron Gross said...

    P.S. The logic in my previous post was a little garbled, but the basic point is still true: national myths do not demonstrate which ethnie is in power."

    The logic in your previous post was not merely garbled. It was wrong.

    National myths clearly do demonstrate who is in and who is not. In the first half of the century, jews had power in Hollywood, but Hollywood was not itself so powerful, so they conformed to the national myths of the dominant people. Now that Hollywood, and other institutions with considerable jewish over-representation, are much more powerful - they push their own myths.

    You can baldly assert things which are not true, but that does not make them true, nor does it persuade the rest of us that they are true.

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  19. Optingoutofamurrika5/15/13, 11:29 AM

    Notice how casually Aaron utilizes the deliberately condescending term "goyim" while not choosing to utilize "schvartzer," the corresponding Yiddish term for blacks.

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