* …it’s not just whites that have inter-white wars. People in every country struggle for power. Race just adds an extra fault line because people feel more kinship (literally) to people who look more like them. So more diversity means more Hobbesianism and less social democracy. Vermont and Sweden look the same for the same reason.
* I’m glad to see that sociology has caught up with what my instincts have always told me, viz. that a middle-class upbringing in a decent neighborhood results in a quantum leap forward when it comes to the child’s opportunities for socioeconomic advancement. To grow up without those opportunities can sometimes be a virtual death sentence for one’s hopes and dreams.
I spent many years and a great deal of effort trying to get myself the hell out of poverty. I grew up in a dusty trailer park that hailed from the T.J. Hooker era—a sort of grease trap for burned out hippies, coke heads, and bikers even back when the neighborhood was mostly white. My parents were two severely dysfunctional and abusive alcoholics and my dad, additionally, was a bona fide sociopath. All the kids from the neighborhood (my friends growing up) were ballers, major or minor criminals, or just Beavis-and-Butthead-type dropouts. Not a few of them today are either in jail, in the state mental hospital, or dead.
I was exposed to another world in school because I was always “gifted.” Books had always been my only refuge from my miserable family life, so I read a lot growing up. I was sort of like a real-life Good Will Hunting. But when I got to high school, when hormones and status hierarchies begin to play a big role in the adolescent’s burgeoning identity, I noticed how different I was from the other preppy kids I was in the AP classes with. The social gulf between us was immense and, from my perspective, unbridgeable. Consequently it was something I thought a great deal about, even from a young age. I realized early on that the experiences they’d had, compared to the ones I’d had, had conditioned them for a very different sort of life than the life I knew. Even though I had the raw intelligence necessary to compete at the highest levels, I certainly did not have any of the other prerequisites, e.g. the social skills, the networks, the knowledge base, or the money. There was no one around me to whom I could reach out to for help with these things. My own life was an abyss of ignorance, drugs, and absent parenting that I had to grope my way out of on my own.
I won’t go into the intervening biographical details, but today I live in a decent house in the suburbs, and I have a secure but not particularly lucrative fed.gov job. I like to surround myself with as much refinement as I can afford: nice clothes, luxury-brand automobiles, musical instruments that I collect and have taught myself (sort of) to play. It’s a bit too late for me to fully absorb these things into my personality, but I’m doing it for the next generation. If I have kids someday, I want them to grow up in the “normal world.” I don’t want them to know what I know.
* This WaPo piece completely ignores the yawning chasm in the values and behavior of (largely white) upper class Americans and (heavily minority) NAMs. Your typical upper middle class household has two parents, at least one with a decent job, and they provide an emotionally stable environment and template for successful male/female relationships. Far too many lower class NAMs are from single parent households with constant ups and downs and a parade of short-lived relationships with the opposite sex that produce half-siblings that may or may not remain in the picture. It doesn’t matter how great the school or teachers are, one child is being shown behavior that gives them a strong chance to retain their economic standing as adults and form stable relationships and families, and the other is learning all the different ways to self-sabotage whatever innate gifts they have.
* Recent articles in Minneapolis and at. Paul papers have been aimed at attacking charter schools. The attack is that charter schools siphon off too many whites, so now that St. Paul city schools are “majority minority”. The newspaper phrased this as “segregated”. It was segregated because the population of white students was down to 22%. See? Steve is right! No longer enough white students to be integrated!
“The Star Tribune defined segregated as any school that had 80 percent or more minority students (predominantly minority) or less than 20 percent minorities (predominantly white).”
Now, charters are also often segragated by choice. We can’t have religious charters, but we can have cultural charters here. So the Hmong have a few, and the Chinese a few, and the Koreans have one, and then there are the hippy dippy Montessori ones for whites, etc.
* I grew up in San Antonio which is now about 80% Mexican, and my school was probably about 70% with the rest white. I hated it. Every white kid hated being outnumbered by this foreign culture. They were clannish and uncouth. However, they were not anti-white per se, they were fairly family oriented, and many were very smart. The “gang bangers” were absolute poseurs. There was no gang activity at my middle or high schools, and they were just this side of middle class. In other words, they were nothing like California’s Mexicans. Can anyone tell me why? Why do Texas Mexicans seem more able to succeed and assimilate?
* Culture + Parenting + Neighborhoods + Luck + Policy… add it all up and you MIGHT equal Genes.
Wealthy parents are the smartest parents on average. For every additional 20K in income, there’s a statistically significant rise in IQ. And IQ is probably, what? 65% heritable? (I know Steve likes to say 50/50, but geneticists I read say that’s underselling it.)
Wherever you put the wealthy kids, they’re going to do pretty well. It has a lot more to do with their DNA than their tutors.
But mixing smart kids in with dumb kids hurts the smart kids more than it helps the dumb kids. So wealthy parents with are smart to pull their smart kids out of public schools (unless they’re in, say, Arcadia).
We should just stop importing dumb kids, and incentivizing dumb parents to have more kids through the welfare state.
* An interesting desegregation experiment could be tried in New Jersey, where affluent, mostly-white/Asian public school districts already subsidize urban black districts like Newark by law. Whatever that subsidy works out to on a per-pupil basis, the state (or a wealthy donor like Zuckerberg) could give a majority-white school 2x that amount to welcome a NAM student.
It could be a win-win for the W/A school and the NAM students if the NAMs are, say, B-student athletes. The NAM students get a chance to shine in sports and maybe get scholarships to D-3 state schools, and the W/A schools get a few talented athletes that can keep their heads above water in non-honors classes.
The A-student NAMs are probably better off staying in their 99% NAM schools and competing for valedictorian and admission to an Ivy League school or eight.
* Yes, SPLC is essentially a fraud organization run by sociopaths. This needs to be pointed out loudly and consistently.
The SPLC sits on assets worth above a quarter of a billion (yes, with a “b”) dollars, without actually doing much of anything to justify its existence. It pays its executives way above standard nonprofit wages (over $300k/yr, and that’s just the cash). As John Derbyshire remarked, “the Southern Poverty Law Center is a dubious racket dedicated mainly to eradicating poverty among its executives—none of whom, by the way, in all the 42 years the SPLC has been in existence, has ever been black.” So, diversity for thee, white male millionaires’ monopoly for me.
The SPLC is so exploitative and self-serving that the auditor CharityWatch gave it an “F” rating, its lowest. It also flunked an audit of the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance.
Speaking of its executives, Morris Dees’s divorce served up some … er, interesting(?) personal details. It was covered by Kathy Shaidle among others some time ago. Some of the papers are online.
And then you can always keep up like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=splc+expose
The SPLC’s name should never appear in print without modifiers such as “charity-scam”, “hypocritical”, “fraudulent”, “exploitative”, “racket”, “scam artist”, “hate group”, “con game”, “witch hunters”, “self-serving”, “discredited”, “organized hate crime”, “racist” and “lying”.
Morris Dees should always be mentioned with the SPLC with the modifiers “wife beater”, “incestuous child molester”, “serial adulterer”, “millionaire”, “well connected to the Democratic establishment” and “con man”. Dees is also a bisexual, mistress-impregnator, and inconvenient-fetus-aborter, but it’s hard to say if those are positives or negatives nowadays.
* Pushing more NAM’s into your white kid’s school systematically sacrifices your child on the altar of uplifting others. Where is the Aztec temple for human sacrifice?
* I really do think that this issue is completely intractable within the current legal and cultural regime, but thankfully that regime is changing. Such is the hope of a Trump presidency.
The whole question of “How can we improve the performance of black/minority students?” is already a Gramscian ploy. The desideratum itself is meaningless, since enhanced student performance (of any color whatever) is not the sort of thing you can just manufacture with policy changes. At any rate, it is nobody else’s responsibility beyond the students themselves and their parents. The kind of social policies that result from the misguided attempts to address this pseudo-problem at the societal level are always and necessarily draconian (e.g. bussing or any type of forced integration). Writing such nonsense into the law simply opens the door for shakedown artists and rentseekers to game the system.
The ultimate answer is to eliminate the DOE and to declare Affirmative Action a dead letter. When we cease making vast sums of money available for racial racketeering schemes, social classes will resegregate and the matter will sort itself out.
* Let’s say there’s a municipal election this November in a small East Coast town with high property taxes, a very good school system, 85% white, and an incumbent Democrat mayor whom a Republican is trying to beat. The traditional GOP anti-tax platform may not work, according to the article, because the upper middle class white majority has chosen to live in this town and pay high taxes to avoid schools full of NAMs and thus unconsciously accepts their high tax bill as a barrier to entry to the community. (Let’s assume another reason it won’t work is there’s a 2% cap that a portly gentleman in our capital legislated a few years back.) My own experience seems to bear out this strange but not strange acceptance of taxes.
Therefore, with the understanding that the BOE and town hall are separate entities creating separate budgets, what strategy could a GOP candidate use to win an election without falling into the “your taxes are too high” “yeah but our schools and good and white” death spiral?
* Again, there’s some truth to the whole McDonald thing. If Jewish people assume that they will always be a separate group within a larger entity, then it follows that they will have an interest in being just one of many groups, so that they cannot be singled out. In the same way, they will tend to have greater allegiance to their group, rather than to some entity extrinsic to their group. However, this ignores the fact that there has been a strong range of attitudes within the Jewish community about assimilation for a couple of hundred years. And, again, in my experience I’d say the majority of Jews I know — whether they are strongly Zionist or observant or what have you — consider themselves just typical white Americans — as long as others treat them that way, and don’t finger them as “Jews” — and would like the US, and Europe, to stay that way.
Exactly why the ADL, etc. is advocating hijabs at the Citadel, I have no idea.