June 9, 2013

NYT Self-Parody Watch: Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves version

It's sometimes hard to tell whether articles in the New York Times are self-aware satire or are just S.O.P. on Autopilot. For example, 
Treatment Still Harsh for Roma in France 
By STEVEN ERLANGER 
Published: June 3, 2013
PARIS — In the last three weeks alone, the French police have dismantled Roma encampments in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, and along the Var River west of Nice. In Lyon, 200 Roma were temporarily housed in a gymnasium when someone set fire to their squat in a disused factory, killing two women and a 12-year-old. 
President François Hollande’s Socialist government came into office a year ago promising a better deal for the Roma, also known as Gypsies, an end to the shantytowns and the rehousing and integration of those displaced. But like other promises, including a return to economic growth, reality has been a recalcitrant political partner. 
Having criticized the previous center-right government of Nicolas Sarkozy for being careless with individual rights and flirting with the anti-immigrant far right, the Hollande government has done little to change policy toward the Roma. The interior minister, Manuel Valls, who has been praised for his organizational ability and toughness, has expelled at least as many non-French Roma as his predecessor and continues to order the police to dismantle illegal camps and shantytowns, without rehousing most of those displaced. 
On Jan. 1, the rules will change, as Romanians and Bulgarians, seven years after entering the European Union, will have the same right to travel and work in member countries as others in the union. But that will not make them more welcome — most illegal Roma immigrants come from those two nations. Fanned by anti-immigrant and nationalist parties of the right and far right all over Europe, the coming change has led to new fears of a large influx of poor workers and criminals seeking to take jobs from citizens and benefit from lavish social welfare systems. 
“In principle, things are different in France, but in practice, things are pretty much the same,” said Dezideriu Gergely, the executive director of the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest. “We expected a different approach, to reduce social exclusion and economic problems, instead of taking a problem and moving it from one place to another.” 
The complexity and tragedy of the problem are easily seen here in Paris at the Gare du Nord, one of the busiest transportation hubs in France.

So far, this has been pretty paint-by-the-numbers. But get a load of Erlanger's example:
Near the third glass door from the left of the older building, young Roma men hover. Small, thin, often wearing bright clothing like green pants or a pink scarf, the men are prostitutes, looking for work or waiting for prearranged rendezvous.
Some are as young as 14, though they insist they are older; some are 16 and married, sometimes with children.

Huh?
They come from a community around Craiova, in south-central Romania. They troll the station to earn a living, which they say gets them about 100 euros a day, or $130. 
A young man named Ruset said he was 19 and had left Romania as a child. He and his friends, like Bogdan, 17, and Gutsa, 17, whose wife is pregnant, “do business” at the station, he said;

And, Gutsa said, in 17 years my son, God willing, will follow in my footsteps at the train station.
they live in a shantytown in a forest east of Paris, near the Noisy-Champs station on the suburban railway line. None wanted to have their family names used. 
“France is terrible for us,” Ruset said, watching for the police, whom he called “superracist, hassling us all the time.” Echoing many of France’s estimated 20,000 noncitizen Roma, he said: “I would like to stay in Romania, but there is no chance to work there. France I liked well at the start, but today things are very hard.”

I presume this example just pushed multiple buttons in NYT subscribers' heads without raising conflicting thoughts about contradictions: Those horrible Parisian nativist racist homophobes, who are no doubt Red State Republican Evangelicals, are oppressing gay teen immigrants who are just trying to feed their wives and children.

In contrast, what percent of NYT readers, do you think, have the other reaction to this example about married teen male prostitutes: Wow, the Roma must have just about the worst culture in the world?

99 comments:

  1. Aren't many Romanians highly desirable people? There are tons of famous scientists and classical musicians from that country. Romanians are white European christians and fully assimilate among other white christians without issue. The women are generally attractive. The top prize at Intel's global youth science fair was just awarded to a Romanian teenager. What society wouldn't want people like that. I believe that some Romanians are obnoxious people, but that goes for any group. Xenophobes often start with some valid points but then end up hating absolutely everyone. What group of people don't you dislike?

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  2. Aren't the French into this sort of thing?

    "Frédéric Mitterrand admitted to paying for sex with 'young boys’ in Thailand"

    "Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s culture minister, was under pressure to resign after it emerged that he had admitted to paying “young boys” for sexual acts while on holiday in Thailand."

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/6270217/Frederic-Mitterrand-admitted-to-paying-for-sex-with-young-boys-in-Thailand.html

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  3. Dear Clay:

    Work on your reading comprehension.

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  4. "Worse than Afghan culture?"

    That was the comparison that immediately came to mind.

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  5. In the last couple of years I started seeing a new type of beggar in the New York subway: young women with infants. Judging by their faces, the women could be Gypsies, or they could be something else. All I know is that the heavy accent in which they beg isn't Spanish. The infants seem oddly quiet. Doped up? The whole thing seems organized. All these women look the same, beg in the same exact way, all strap their infants to their chests.

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  6. Dear Anonymous:

    Work on your date comprehension.

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  7. @ Clay

    Why are you rattling on about Romanians?

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  8. I'm inclined to believe that Clay's never really encountered real gypsies in France. They are commonly despised there, IMHO.

    They're not Romanian academics. Romania produces some great academics, but they don't come from the Roma.

    My experience with the Roma, as a nice American, has freaked me out a bit. Stolen baggage, crazy crippled-old-lady begging, etc.

    Sure, it's just my anecdotal experience. But it in no way contradicts the stereotypes. This troglodyte awaits evidence to the contrary.



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  9. I've noticed the influx of gypsy beggars is NYC as well. Unlike other beggars they and their children look plump and healthy. They don't seem to get much sympathy from people on the subway.

    I also see young gypsy men with accordions and violin playing for money. Have to admit they are great musicians.

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  10. I've heard that there is a non-insignificant Gypsy population in the United States, but they often claim to be Greek or Lebanese.

    Peter

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  11. I've heard that there are lots of gypsies in Sacramento, of all places.

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  12. it's so easy6/9/13, 8:02 PM

    Was trying to think of an "[x] rotting in the fields" snowclone for this story but all my ideas were not suitable for a family website.

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  13. Aren't many Romanians highly desirable people?

    Whenever someone attempts play the offense card with gypsies (Don't you know 'gypsy' is highly offensive? They are called 'Roma and Sinti'), I point out that 'Roma' is also offensive - to Romanians.

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  14. "They troll the station to earn a living"...

    Substitute the words steal from innocent people for "troll".

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  15. This movie is about 25 years old http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097223/

    Far from being "luminous" (per imdb), its horrifying. Gypsies are dreadful. No one wants them around.

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  16. "I point out that 'Roma' is also offensive - to Romanians."

    And to the natives of the Eternal City.

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  17. The grocery store I do my food shopping at has a western union money wiring service. I was waiting at the nearby checkout line and this vaguely brown looking woman walked over with a pack of kids. They were all shabbily dressed and scruffy looking. Suddenly the women (who looked like she didn't have a dollar to her name) reached under her sweater and pulled out a huge wad of cash she wanted to send home. It was over six thousand dollars and it was going to a place in Romania. That was when I knew for sure she was a Roma.

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  18. There is probably no group for whom a stereotype is more true then Gypsies.

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  19. Ok, my post obviously confused Romanians with Romanis. Just two letters off. Can you ammend/delete my first post?

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  20. googled "why is xenophobia bad" and got


    6 results in 0.35 seconds


    One discussion was actually cogent:

    http://www.ted.com/conversations/8539/to_what_extent_is_xenophobia_a.html


    Anyway, the lack of curiosity reminds me of the point Steve made that what goes unsaid often goes unthought.

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  21. Do the Roma spend a lot of time on the internet? If as I suppose they don't, they may be somewhat protected from governments who's security policies will over time be fastened onto this thing.

    As to embarassing or incriminating emails, tweets, and facebook postings...

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  22. I would think that Afghans still hold the trophy because of their predilection towards savage violence . Gypsies are generally not particularly violent
    I have noticed more Gypsies here in Southern California. I am from Italy where we have a ton of them and you learn to pick them out at a distance because they just look oddly "off" from anyone else. Perhaps because of inbreeding they looking subtly distinctive. The most recent one was a woman begging at a freeway off ramp. A couple of weeks before that one pretending to be Italian stopped me In Trader Joe's parking lot asking me for directions to the airport, then gave me a fake Armani
    business card, told me he didn't want to take his samples back through customs and tried to give me an Armani jacket for my kindness. He gave up when I basically started laughing at him and he exhausted his limited supply of Italian words.
    Honestly , people who have warm sentiments about Gypsies simply have never had anything to do with them.

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  23. "Far from being "luminous" (per imdb), its horrifying. Gypsies are dreadful. No one wants them around."


    LOL, they just meant that the show shines light on the Gypsies.

    Okay, I have heard that the gypsies aren't really from Egypt, but when I was visiting the pyramids and my husband tried to buy something from a vendor who sure looked and behaved like a gypsy. If gypsies aren't from Egypt, they may have made their way there as well.

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  24. Clay, we will amend your post. But not for 12 hours. We wan you to think about what you did.

    Dan in DC

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  25. William Boot6/9/13, 9:38 PM

    If you're curious about
    Gypsy culture, at least as it existed around NYC in the years immediately before and after WWII, I'd recommend two pieces that Joseph Mitchell wrote for the New Yorker.

    If memory serves, one is called "The King of the Gypsies" and the other is called "The Gypsy Women." The first, being early Mitchell, is the lighter piece but they're both far more informative than anything you could write about Gypsies today — and yet they both make Gypsy culture fully human in a way that the supposedly less patronizing articles of today do not.

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  26. Guys, I suspect Clay isn't going to get it without a much more direct explanation.

    Clay, the Roma and Romanians are two different groups. The shared first 4 letters is a coincidence. The Roma are the gypsies. They are not Romanians. They live in many countries, Romania among them. They are not from Romania originally. They are a totally different ethnic group.

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  27. In contrast, what percent of NYT readers, do you think, have the other reaction to this example about married teen male prostitutes: Wow, the Roma must have just about the worst culture in the world?

    Seem about like the Irish "travelers" to me. Once they're in your area you can't get rid of them because nobody else wants them nearby.

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  28. Right, Gypsies aren't terribly violent. A few years ago in SoCal there was a murder of one Gypsy by another Gypsy family in a dispute over fortune-telling turf, but that's fairly rare.

    The Pathan, another obvious contender for worst culture in the world (owing to their extreme individualism that sets father against son), are pretty brave, although I note that the Taliban's great military achievement, extricating Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora in 2001, was apparently due primarily to a Chechen rear guard.

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  29. I'd say the worst culture in the world belongs to South African blacks, particularly the Zulu and Xhosa.

    They seem to be behind most of the mind-boggling crime that comes out of that country. They have a literal "rape culture" that leftists and feminists nowadays seem to believe is rife among white america.

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  30. The Five Jays6/9/13, 10:20 PM

    Most American gypsies (and a substantial portion of Western European gypsies) are now Pentacostal Christians. Check out the phrase "God's Gypsy Christian Church" for a look at a few of their congregations.

    Also, American gypsies seem to love golf. Many of the churches hold annual golf tournaments. Plenty of stuff on YouTube.

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  31. It is quite impossible to make a census of the Gypsy population in the United States. Not that the government would want to--they would be terrified to find out. Bulgaria, a small country, takes the trouble to attempt to count them (Gypsies being a great deal of trouble.)They have them at 4.7% of the population--800,000.
    If Gypsies were one percent of the American population they would number three million. They are in my opinion far more than one percent, and has been noted they have quite large families. What keeps their number from exploding is an extraordinarily low life span. Diabetes, lifestyle, complete lack of medical care, alcoholism, and homicide. But the fact is, they'd rather die than trade lives with their marks. It could be they have a point.

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  32. This weekend I learned a new euphemism: "former horse traders". Well, it made me laugh.

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  33. "Romanis eunt domus." (To the Roma, they go the house...)

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  34. jews = high functioning gypsies

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  35. To James Wilson:

    Bulgaria has 800,000 Gypsies at 4.7% of the population? According to Wikipedia, the total population of Bulgaria is only 7,364,570 people.

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  36. Here's a question: awhile ago, something like 15 Taliban commandos got inside the perimeter of USMC base in Afghanistan and blew up five hugely expensive Harrier jump jets. All but one commando was killed in a fire fight, but it was still the biggest single loss in battle for American air power in decades. We all those Taliban commandos Pathans?

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  37. Yes, they seem pretty bad. But what about all the customers, presumably French, who are hiring these Gypsy boy prostitutes? Who are they and aren't they providing a market for these 'services?

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  38. The Europeans have invited this problem to get worse by granting EU membership (a club should generally try to be somewhat exclusive, otherwise it is not much of a club anymore) to countries with known, large populations of Roma -- eg Romania, Bulgaria. Initial restrictions on the movement of Romanians and Bulgarians to other EU countries either have or are about to expire.

    It's going to be a problem everywhere.

    And here is why for anything other than environmental questions, the Green Party should be ignored.

    No matter how unsuitable they are, or how many there are, the answer is always to spend more taxpayer money on 'integration' efforts.

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  39. The EU is a pure load of destructive shit - but no one, apart from the nationalist right has actually got the balls to call it out and state the obvious.
    - Basically, the EU has abolished democracy at the nation-state level, giving indigenous Frenchmen no more rights in the nation of their bith than it does to a Romanian with zero connection to France.
    Yup, teenaged male prostitutes, that's just what France needs.

    THe EU is just another elitist load of crap that has been forced upon the people by a pompous political class. In the same category put open-borders immigration, Friedmanite bull-poopy and the rest.

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  40. The other ridiculous aspect is what would the NYT readers think if Roma set up an encampment in Central Park?

    I mean, if you take the NTY's implied perspective seriously, Manhattan would be "super racist" for opposing a Roma camp in their neighborhood.

    This is to me the most interesting issue with the NYT's current slant. It's increasingly denouncing the rest of the world for very policies that they support and vote for themselves in NYT.

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  41. Apparently there are 500,000 Indian dalits from India living in Britain.
    A number the size of a major British provinicial city such as Leeds or Bristol.
    This only come to light after dalits started whining about being discriminated aginast by caste Indians in the UK.
    Strangely enough, in all my born years in England, I've never, ever seen anyone of remotely Indian appearance ever lift a trash-can or wield a broom.
    What are all these dalits doing in Britain?

    It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the British governemnt made the descendants of 'manual sweepers' into senior level bureaucrats ruling over native Brits.

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  42. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjBoB3vBjnY

    MGU: Thoughts on Waxman vs. Finke

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  43. A lot of credit is being given here to non-Roma Romanians as regular white people and welcome migrants over the other choices but the data shows that Romanians aren't quite white.

    According to GDP per capita, Romania is at the level of $8000. This is lower than Mexico at $10,000. After 25 years of free market reforms, Romania has managed a very underwhelming performance. I can't help but conclude Romanians are a largely flawed people outside of the white core.

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  44. I look forward to the NYT piece entitled 'A Cool and Logical Analysis of the Gypsy Menace.' (Apologies to PJ O'Rourke)

    Gilbert P.

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  45. Curiously, I am reading Dmitri Orlov's new book, "The Five Stages of Collapse", and he has a section on the Roma, which he basically likes. One of his points is having the worst culture in the world is exactly what the Roma want you to think about them. He seems to like the Pashtuns too, but I haven't read that part of the book yet.

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  46. "Aren't many Romanians highly desirable people?" Roma =/= Romanian.

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  47. Aren't many Romanians highly desirable people? - Clay

    Im not sure if your comment was ironic Clay? The article is not about Romanians. Its about the Roma, an unrelated ethnic group who happen to live in Romania in large numbers. They are nothing to do with the people you are talking about.

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  48. No matter how unsuitable they are, or how many there are, the answer is always to spend more taxpayer money on 'integration' efforts.

    It would be far better to pay to ship them all back to India (no right of return either).

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  49. They have a literal "rape culture" that leftists and feminists nowadays seem to believe is rife among white america.

    No no no no! Leftists and feminists know for a fact that indulging in sexual intercourse with a baby will cure HIV.

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  50. no offence, but indians will be sensitive to being bracketed with romas. there is a community here known as the domas who as per dna testing are related to the romas. The domas are those who handle dead bodies in india. the lowest of the lowest here. i think they seem to have moved up in life in france and wouldnt want to come back to india.

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  51. Husker Don't6/10/13, 4:01 AM

    I've only run into gypsies once - in the parking lot of the Whole Foods at Santa Monica and Fairfax.

    I'd gotten into a wreck recently and my car was pretty beat up. As soon as I got out to go inside, this old jalopy pulled up carrying an old guy, a younger guy, and a younger girl. They old got guy gets out and told me they're with the service department of Infiniti of Calabasas (not a real place). Offered to fix my car while I shopped and opened his trunk to reveal a bunch of who knows what kind of equipment. $3,000.

    No.

    $2,500.

    No.

    I think he got down to $300 before he gave up. The whole thing was bizarre.

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  52. I can't help but conclude Romanians are a largely flawed people outside of the white core.

    sounds like someone's mad that he didn't even get a bronze at the math olympiad. http://www.romania-insider.com/romanias-brains-rank-first-in-europe-10th-in-the-world-after-math-olympiad/60686/

    as for low levels of economic development, romania is obviously very corrupt and has a dysfunctional business culture, but the same is true of every country that was under turkish control. you might as well say that russians aren't white because of alcoholism, aids and TB. fine, but what about this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_scientists

    it's not as though the greeks were white in 1100 ad and suddenly turned non-white in 1600 ad; rather, the ottomans systematically reduced the greeks to the cultural level of occupied peasants, and the greeks went from being a people capable of sustaining a high culture to being largely concerned with lying to the cops and stealing from the tax collectors -- a mentality and culture that persists to the present day.

    imagine a 500-year ottoman occupation of england. i wonder what would have become of the british national character? well, perhaps we needn't wonder any longer, actually...

    --bbtp

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  53. As far as we can tell, Gypsies have been scamming for many generations now. Yet, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for Darwinian selection making them more clever at scamming.

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  54. Anonydroid at 1:37 am said: I can't help but conclude Romanians are a largely flawed people outside of the white core.

    Hunsdon said: Your ethnographic insight is dazzling and unique.

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  55. My encounters with Pashtuns were pretty positive considering the circumstances (paratrooper near Khost in 2003 - 04). Even among them though, there was an urban/rural distinction with the former mocking the latter as effete and the urban Pashtuns talking about the rural prospenity for boyfucking. Big no no.

    Of course, the prism I'm viewing them through is a bit different. The guerillas we worked with were brave to a fault, uncomplaining of hardship, and would literally give you the shirt off their back. Good to have fighting by your side if you're in rugged, mountainous terrain (like Arizona), but the traits that make them the best irregular infantry in the world don't make for the best neighbors in the Western world.

    Shame all those eggheads making bucks at the think tanks can't figure that out.

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  56. My family is originally from Greece and the older generation has nothing good to say about the Gypsies.

    In fact, the word "Gypsy" is often used as an insult among many Greeks for someone who is sloppy, lazy, or dishonest. I think the word is also used like this among many other Eastern Europeans.

    Although their numbers appear to be growing in Europe, alarming many European natives, the Gypsies themselves have plenty of good population control policies(though not intentional). Their poor hygiene, malnutrition, hostility to any medical care, and very high alcoholism and smoking rates ensures few of them live for very long.

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  57. To anonymous, concerning the link about the Romanians being first in the math Olympiad in Europe: "Two Romanians, Radu Bumbacea and Omer Cerrahoglu"

    I'm not sure about the first, but the second name is clearly Turkish or Tatar due to the "oglu" ending. My experience with Romanians is that the old white Christian peasant stock is a very average group, while Romanians of Tatar or Hungarian descent tend to be above average performers(the same goes for the Jews).

    The smartest Romanians I've personally known, besides Jews, were often half or quarter Tatar or they were ethnic Hungarians(and less commonly Germans) who had been assimilated into Romanian culture in communist Romania. A list of prominent Romanians seems to suggest this too.

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  58. Steve Sailer: "As far as we can tell, Gypsies have been scamming for many generations now. Yet, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for Darwinian selection making them more clever at scamming."

    The selection is maybe for tenaciousness, rather than intelligence, since even with a moderate rise in intelligence the individual would realise that there are better things to do than pick pockets. I suspect gypsies on the right end of the bell curve end up merging into the surrounding population (unless prejudices hold them back).

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  59. Speaking of the Pashtun, I've always wondered whether their current state of awfulness is related to centuries, or perhaps millennia of inbreeding. The Pashtun are the most European-looking ethnic group in Afghanistan and seem to have been there the longest (the other major ethnic groups, the Tajiks and Hazaris, are related to the Persians and Mongols, respectively). It is also believed that the pre-historic Indo-European invasion of India came from Afghanistan. Based on all of this, my hypothesis is that the Pashtun are the most undiluted current living ancestors of the Proto Indo-Europeans. The same Proto Indo-Eiropeans that first domesticated the horse, conquered Europe and India, and spawned a language family now spoken by a majority of the world's population. How did they fall so far? Isolation and inbreeding.

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  60. "he Pashtun are the most European-looking ethnic group in Afghanistan"

    That's basically Daniel Dravot's view in Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" -- the the Kafiristanis (who are basically the most isolated of the Pashtuns) look like Europeans and they sit on chairs, so they must be Europeans. Peachy Carnehan isn't so sure.

    To make this point, the movie was going to be filmed in a part of Turkey where the people are rather European looking, but then some things came up and it had to be moved to Morocco, so Huston dropped that element, and then that opened up using Michael Caine's Indian wife as Connery's bride.

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  61. There's a huge Gypsy community outside Ft. Gordon, in Augusta GA (I think the Gypsies are on the SC side of the river). We got a couple of briefings about how to identify and avoid them, but they were fairly well-off from doing a bunch of construction work, so they weren't as active with the scamming as their reputation. That said, their leader was very concerned with inbreeding, so the big "scam" they'd do is to try to get a non-Gypsy man to knock up one of their girls. It must have been relatively effective, because they didn't stand out due to brownness so much as their women's thick makeup and elaborate 80s-style hair.

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  62. Why on earth would anyone shun prostitutes and thieves?

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  63. Jack Hanson said: The guerillas we worked with were brave to a fault, uncomplaining of hardship, and would literally give you the shirt off their back. Good to have fighting by your side if you're in rugged, mountainous terrain (like Arizona), but the traits that make them the best irregular infantry in the world don't make for the best neighbors in the Western world.

    Hunsdon said: Well said, sir. Well said. (I've tried to say something similar in the past about Chechens and wolves.)

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  64. The Five Jays6/10/13, 7:50 AM

    There's a huge Gypsy community outside Ft. Gordon, in Augusta GA (I think the Gypsies are on the SC side of the river). We got a couple of briefings about how to identify and avoid them, but they were fairly well-off from doing a bunch of construction work, so they weren't as active with the scamming as their reputation...

    Those aren't Roma, they're Irish Travelers, an entirely different parasitic ethnic group. The "construction work" they do is almost always a form of scam perpetrated on the elderly.

    Although, some of them are much more clever, like the trio who defrauded Home Depot of a few million dollars.

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  65. "Clay said...

    Aren't many Romanians highly desirable people? ....... What group of people don't you dislike?"

    Steve was talking about gypsies (Roma, in contemporary PC-speech), not Romanians.

    I don't think anyone much minds Romanians.

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  66. Yes, they seem pretty bad. But what about all the customers, presumably French, who are hiring these Gypsy boy prostitutes? Who are they and aren't they providing a market for these 'services?

    iSteve commenters never let you down. One of them, who hasn't emerged from his basement in decades, is always sure to believe he has a common sense interjection to make. You may have excitedly thought you could repurpose your "business lures them here, it's not their fault" argument for Mexican illegals, but it doesn't work.

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  67. "...my hypothesis is that the Pashtun are the most undiluted current living ancestors of the Proto Indo-Europeans..."

    Of all the modern Indo-European languages, Lithuanian has diverged the least from proto-Indo-European. It belongs to the Baltic branch of the family. The Slavic branch, which is closely related to the Baltic branch, is right behind it in linguistic conservatism. I've seen it claimed that Balto-Slavs were simply the guys left behind after all the other Indo-Europeans went off on far-flung conquests. That's a guess of course. All theories about the physical location of the IE urheimat, including the Kurgan theory, are guesses with little to substantiate them.

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  68. In response to 6/10/13, 5:33 AM:

    >To anonymous, concerning the link about the Romanians being first in the math Olympiad in Europe: "Two Romanians, Radu Bumbacea and Omer Cerrahoglu"

    >I'm not sure about the first, but the second name is clearly Turkish or Tatar due to the "oglu" ending.

    The first one isn't Turkish or Tatar. Radu = "Rudolph". Bumbacea is a fairly common name pertaining to cotton or upholstery. 5 of the 6 Romanian winners this year were ethnic Romanians, but I guess you didn't feel the need to list those names.

    Omer Cerrahoglu is a child of Turkish immigrants, IIRC, not a "Turkish Romanian" (an ethnicity that doesn't exist).

    > My experience with Romanians is that the old white Christian peasant stock is a very average group, while Romanians of Tatar or Hungarian descent tend to be above average performers(the same goes for the Jews).

    Big talk from a guy who can't tell what ethnicity "Radu Bumbacea" might be. So much for your extensive experience with Romanians. As for Romanian Tatars, they are around 1/10 of 1% of the national population and they mostly live in small villages.

    > A list of prominent Romanians seems to suggest this too.

    Nah. No Tatars on this list; enough Jews, Hungarians and Germans to be noticed, not enough to say they predominate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Romanians#Science . It would be more accurate to say that Aromanians (Greek Vlachs) are overrepresented, but these days, they are totally assimilated in Romania and in Greece, as the case may be, so have fun unscrambling that egg.

    To reiterate, anyone who talks about "Romanian Turks" and the vast scientific contributions of Romanian Tatars is an ignorant blowhard and totally out of his depth. Someone who can't tell from names alone what ethnicity Ion Popescu or Dumitru Voicu is has no business imagining himself to be an authority on the internal racial dynamics of the Balkans. And someone who pretends to have personal knowledge of the situation when he's clearly wiki-educated on the subject should really stop posting and ask himself where his life went wrong.

    --bbtp

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  69. Wow, the Roma must have just about the worst culture in the world?

    Well, since they´ve been around for ages living off other´s peoples societies, in perfect parasitic symbiosis, it´s debatable.
    Certainly,you wouldn´t want them as guests in your country or as neighbors in your town. A sound person wouldn´t, at any rate. They don´t obey any other rules than their own, and don´t seem to have any kind of reciprocal morality.
    Any stranger is dead meat to Gypsies, not fully human, only good to swindle, rob rape or kill.
    Unlike other minority groups,they don´t possess any redeeming features.
    To quote Voltaire on Old Testament Jews, it makes you wonder, had they been cannibals they´d be considered the vilest people on earth!
    (Not that Voltaire had a better opinion on contemporary Jews!)

    Of course, if you´re keen on any flavour of Gypsy music, you might reconsider too their position on the scale of human existence.

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  70. Randall Parker said...
    Guys, I suspect Clay isn't going to get it without a much more direct explanation.

    Clay, the Roma and Romanians are two different groups. The shared first 4 letters is a coincidence.


    The similarity may be coincidental, but the people who decided we were supposed to call Gypsies Roma wanted them to be confused with Romanians. As clay said, many Romanians are good and intelligent people. Roma ain't, so the confusion is a feature, not a bug.

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  71. Fanned by anti-immigrant and nationalist parties of the right and far right all over Europe, the coming change has led to new fears of a large influx of poor workers and criminals seeking to take jobs from citizens and benefit from lavish social welfare systems.

    So the "coming change" is what was "fanned?" This kind of illiteracy would never have occurred in the days of editors.

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  72. Having first-hand experience with one of these gypsy lowlifes in Paris when I chased off one very aggressive grifter looking for money, by using the "I found this ring on the ground and it must be yours so will you give me a reward, or I'll continue harassing you until you do" scam, I can say their reputation is well deserved.

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  73. @To Husker Don't:

    My car has a huge dent at the left rear. Recently, a guy in a big F-250 began honking at me madly on
    19th Ave. in SF. Having experience with this, I ignored him. He followed for two blocks honking. I turned off and circled back a block. Apparently he'd seen the maneuver before, and was there waiting for me when I got back on 19th. "Man, why you ignoring me, I can fix that for you." I finally told him the car couldn't be repaired because it was going to be in the next Lucas film. "Oh, cool man." For me, Hispanics are at least as aggressive as Roma.

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  74. Stavros said, "Like Nigerian email scammers, the Roma have a curious mix of tenacity and poor intelligence. When many people in the world have made an honest success of their life, there will always be a job for people to exploit this success.

    If this wandering and parasitic people had a reasonable level of intelligence to go with their tenacity, then they might be able to have a large influence over the banking and entertainment industries. Thank god there are no groups which are able to do this."


    Very funny. So funny that I almost wonder if you're not actually Steve.

    After all, "Stavros" is just four letters off from "Steve", right, Clay?

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  75. ...the Gypsies themselves have plenty of good population control policies(though not intentional). Their poor hygiene, malnutrition, hostility to any medical care, and very high alcoholism and smoking rates ensures few of them live for very long.

    Many of these controls will disappear as the EU freedom of movement laws allow them to move to Northern European countries with good health care (free of course) and generous welfare benefits.

    A few years ago in SoCal there was a murder of one Gypsy by another Gypsy family in a dispute over fortune-telling turf...

    Wow, if that's not diversity, nothing is.

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  76. This is why, to deter illegal immigration, France should have a 12 Euro-an-hour minimum wage for 14-year-old male prostitutes.

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  77. Is there a more bad culture then the gypsies?

    Name a great Gypsy work of literature?

    Name a great Gypsy scientist?

    Captain of industry?

    Great inventor?

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  78. Django Reinhardt, a Gypsy, was the greatest jazz guitarist. Some top actors are part Gypsy, such as Bob Hoskins, one of my favorites. There's a theory that Charlie Chaplin's dark looks and musical talent come from his mother being part Gypsy (not Jewish, as is more popularly believed).

    There are probably Spanish Gypsies of some renown. They seem more accomplished than other Gypsies for some reason.

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  79. "Here's a question: awhile ago, something like 15 Taliban commandos got inside the perimeter of USMC base in Afghanistan and blew up five hugely expensive Harrier jump jets. All but one commando was killed in a fire fight, but it was still the biggest single loss in battle for American air power in decades. We all those Taliban commandos Pathans?"

    Well I have no idea if those guys were Pathans, but here's a fun aside: in the Korean war, the most successful attack launched against grounded American aircraft was by a Po-2 biplane. It involved a Nork chucking bombs out of the back at night (WW1 style) going about 90 mph. He destroyed one Sabre and severely damaged several more with one bomb.

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  80. Back in my Army days, my Urdu teacher, a Punjabi Muslim, talked of Pathans as thought they were a romantic bunch, like Scots highlanders, that, along with Persians, were considered cool to be descended from by Pakistanis. President Ayub Khan, for example, was a Pathan, as are other members of the Pakistani ruling class.

    Having said that, I have to agree with Clay, Romulans aren't all that bad a bunch. A little more militaristic than their Vulcan cousins, of course, but much cleaner and well-spoken than your average Klingon.

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  81. The funny thing about the Camp Bastion attack (the one that rendered a Harrier unit combat ineffective) is that its part of the 'diversity is our greatest strength' nonsense that infects the military. The Tongans were responsible for keeping the watch towers manned, but were known to get to the top and immediately racked out. While this would be good for an Article 15 in the US, the base brass ignored this very salient fact and the insurgency was able to slip in and destroy a number of literally irreplaceable jets.

    The story itself has all the hallmarks of a movie, with the Lieutenant Colonel leading his troops into battle with only a pistol and dying in the process and the support staff picking up rifles and going into combat. However the facts behind what led to the attack are too messy for the brass, I guess.

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  82. Most American gypsies (and a substantial portion of Western European gypsies) are now Pentacostal Christians. Check out the phrase "God's Gypsy Christian Church" for a look at a few of their congregations.

    Thanks for the link. After watching parts of these videos I must say that if I didn't know otherwise I'd have a hard time classifying the people in ethnic terms. Not quite European, not quite Middle Eastern ... more by default than anything else I probably would have gone with Turkish or maybe Iranian, though the part about their being in a Christian church would have been hard to explain.

    Peter

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  83. You're correct that Spanish gypsies (called "Gitanos") are pretty successful by gypsy standards. Much more so than gypsy populations elsewhere.

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  84. To get "gypped" is an old term for getting ripped off, robbed, etc., and is derived from "gypsy".

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  85. Anonymous said...
    Apparently there are 500,000 Indian dalits from India living in Britain.

    --

    Not true, there are 3 million Indians in UK of which 1 million are Punjabis and 20% of them, 200K are dalits - dalit sikhs

    The british imported lots of sikhs
    and lots of sikh dalits came with them

    This dalit issue in UK is a conflict between Dalit Sikhs and Jat Sikhs, no Hindus involved

    Some years ago, in Switzerland, Jat Sikhs murdered a Dalit Sikh preacher

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  86. On Youtube, search for 'Pashtun Bachabazi'

    It has videos of hundreds of Pashtun men, watching strippers dance - except these strippers are 6 year old boys and after the show, off-show, they have sex with the richest patron

    But, 1000 years ago, the Pashtuns were civilised. Remember the Bamiyan Buddhas

    The Sanskrit language was codified by Panini in Taxila university ( Pashtun area

    1000 years ago, before islam, the largest Buddhist monastery in the world was in Naubahar in Afghanistan

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  87. "iSteve commenters never let you down."
    Hah, another customer outed.

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  88. I've run into gypsies in Switzerland as well as France, Germany, Britain etc etc etc.....One common feature is that they never seem to bathe and stink like hell.

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  89. The dislike of Pashtuns is a problem created by multiculturalism. Left to themselves, they would wage war among themselves and wander in the badlands of Afghanistan and the North West Frontier. They would not bother anyone. But we now want to turn them into Episcopalians. This can only end in disaster.

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  90. Dr Van Nostrand6/11/13, 11:12 AM

    "First they came for the gypsies".....

    If only that "first they came for" meme hadnt gotten hold, Gypsies would be much easier to deal with.

    The only time I encountered them was in Moscow when a bunch of gypsy kids started singing some Bollywood songs(with perfect accents btw) and guide deftly told us to watch our belongings as they tend to be have sticky fingers.

    I shudder to think that I am even distantly related to this riff raff of a society.


    re rec1man

    finally some accurate info from you!

    Panini had taught at Taxila where he had formalized Sanskrit grammar but he was really from Sindh ,hence the suffix "ni" that many Sindhi names carry to this day.

    He is described as a northwestern type with fair skin and brown hair.

    Also the people in Afghanistan of the Bamiyan era are not the same people as today. They were for the most part Punjabi and Sindhi settlers with a strong Greek component.
    Large numbers of Greeks,Persians and aforementioned Indians had converted to Buddhism in Afghanistan
    All these died off mostly from the Hunnic invasions and then the Arab Islamic conquest.

    The present day Pathans carry a great deal of Turkic blood(as you can tell by the name Khan).
    Apart from their language Pushtu and Caucasoid appearance, all other aspects of their culture-blood feuds,honor vendettas,martial dances,pastoral society,carpets,horsemanship ,music etc is strongly Turkic.

    The idea of noble ,loyal Pathan who is brave and true to his word was already on its way out during the more modernist,cosmopolitan rule of the Uzbek puppet of the Soviets in 70s. It was briefly revived in the 80s funded by U.S money and Saudi holy zeal only to self implode in 90s under the Taliban.

    The noble savage aspect of the Pushtuns is done ,finished ,zilch. Now they are just known as drug smugglers, refugees,shiftless mercenaries and pimps to their own women.
    Now they are just well savages

    But honorable Pathans do still exist but for most part they happen to swear loyalty to the Republic of India where they serve heroically in its police and armed forces.

    And Bollywood of course!

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  91. Have you ever heard of the Dacianos gypsies? The conventional view is the elaborate mutilations they are said to have inflicted on children are a myth. I'm not so sure.

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  92. bloated windbag said: Your ethnographic insight is dazzling and unique.

    Not much of a rebuttal buddy.

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  93. "The Tongans were responsible for keeping the watch towers manned, but were known to get to the top and immediately racked out."

    It might not have mattered if the Tongans were asleep. As part of the drawdown, the senior officers decided to leave unmanned the guard tower nearest to where the fence was breached. And we don't know if the Tongans were asleep because there is no public report. It's left unreleased to leave unexposed the incompetence of the British officers charged with defending Camp Bastion.

    I suspect the Tongans were asleep info is just scapegoating. There is that habit in the military.

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  94. Reply to Rec1man said...

    That just goes to show, no matter how bad a people you are, Islam makes you even worse.

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  95. Some have compared Jews to Gypsies. I know there are a lot of people here with varying degrees of dislike for Jews but this is a poor comparison. The well educated cosmopolitan Jews have many disagreeable traits (vehement universalism among them) but they are NOTHING like any Gypsies I have ever seen.

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  96. > 6/11/13, 12:23 PM

    > bloated windbag said: Your ethnographic insight is dazzling and unique.

    > Not much of a rebuttal buddy.

    I disagree. All of your points were not merely wrong but so objectively wrong that you have no credibility.

    All you have to do is say, "Yes, if I don't even know that Martin Wagner is a German name, I won't opine on the ethnic dynamics of Germany. I won't pretend to have significant personal experience with Sorbs and German Danes". You don't have to say it to me, but please, say it to yourself.

    --bbtp

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