Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* When I was growing up, my father was a Rotarian and seemed to really love it. I felt really disconnected in my rootless suburb a few months back and decided to look up the local Rotary group. I closed the browser as soon as I saw it was all women. I don’t need that headache.

* From Robert Putnam:

* Look at the bright side.

No one for years has knocked on my door trying to sell me overpriced cookies.

* Scouting is definitely an Anglo thing in the United States, and to us, a very typically American childhood activity.

Of course, scouting has been a worldwide phenomenon for over a century, but oddly, it’s not necessarily an “Anglo” thing beyond our shores. It would be natural to assume that the scouting movement strictly followed the British Empire, but the largest contingent of scouts in the world is in Indonesia, which has twice as many as the United States.

While there is a something of a weak correlation with the British Commonwealth, scouting exists in strength in many other non-Anglo countries too.

More interesting is the rapidity with which the scouting movement caught on. Indonesia’s scouts date back to before WW I as indeed do the scouts in most of the other major scouting countries. And in most of them, the girl scouts or girl guides organizations were established within a decade of the boys’ organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Organization_of_the_Scout_Movement_members

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Association_of_Girl_Guides_and_Girl_Scouts_members

Note also that there are many other national scouting organizations around the world which are not inspired by or affiliated to the movement started by Robert Baden-Powell—these are mostly in the former East Bloc countries and Communist China. My comments and the links are not about those, just as Steve Sailer’s comments are strictly about scouts in America.

* The only reason we plan on sending our daughters to the Girl Scouts is because they’ll meet nice kids. Increasing the number of poor NAMs would be a deal breaker for us.

* The eradication of male only spaces has a long and storied history. Harvard is now doing its bit by closing down male-only clubs and, in order to be fair, the female-only clubs.

Society was much nicer before liberals launched their war on freedom of association.

* The Judith Rich Harris strategy – parents can have inordinate influence by shaping the peer networks of their children. Your kid can’t fall in with a bad crowd if your kid is never around a bad crowd.

* When social mores were more restrictive those who violated the mores were instantly recognized as unfit for good company. As we eased up on uptight morality and permitted a wider range of behaviors to fall within acceptable society, it became more troublesome to snoop out the misfits who violated the old standards of morals.

* So people with an outsized sense of entitlement and resentment towards the culture that enables them are uninterested in civic organizations? Something must be done!

* This article talks about anti-Black racism in China and India.

The article refers to Chinese people as racially homogeneous, but describes Black people as racially diverse, which feeds into my personal theory that in a majority of cases when Liberals say diversity/diverse it is code word for Black people.

The article also says Indians have a positive bias towards White people, but I don’t see that in interracial marriage statistics, as Indians are the Asian group who are the least likely to marry White people.

Even White guys on the Roosh V forum have said that it is a lot easier for a White guy to get a Black girlfriend than it is for a White guy to get an Indian girlfriend.

* Indians are highly endogamous, as Razib will confirm, with nearly 3,000 groups in the Indian sub-continent that do not marry outside their groups, also known casually as sub-castes.

While we in the West have long subscribed to the greatly oversimplified colonial description of Indian societies as belonging to four castes,the reality, in terms of mating, is immensely more complex. Hierarchies can be circular, intersect and so on, and it is only under certain circumstances that sub-caste lines are crossed.

While light skin is desirable in mating in India, actual white people are about as outcast as imaginable. This carries over into the practices of Indian immigrants to America.

Additionally, there has long been a premium on virginity in both the male and the female in arranged marriages.

White American males are automatically suspect on that count at some sub-conscious level, and Indian girls face subtle pressure from their parents to not date white guys as they are presumed to be non-virginal.

I merely recount what I have anecdotally learned during the course of lunchtime conversations with Indian colleagues at work, male and female. Those with actual knowledge should correct the impressions, as necessary.

* A couple of years ago I was at the polls with a friend of mine named Pete. Pete was an older Rockefeller type Republican but despite this, a really good guy. As we always did, we were talking a little inside baseball local politics, when someone who had brought Girl Scout cookies offered Pete and I some Lemonades. Pete ate a few and when the cookies were offered to me I said “No thanks, I don’t support that Lesbian recruitment outfit.” Pete laughed hysterically. I was able to pull up enough material to support the proposition on my phone within a short time that Pete stopped laughing. Unfortunately, he passed away not long after that day.

* Girl Scouts of America is all but a lesbian dating circle. No sane parent would allow their daughter into it, and after the latest shenanigans I wouldn’t be touching Boy Scouts of America, either.

* Girl Scouts are for relatively functional families. It’s like giving vitamins to someone to supplement a generally healthy diet.

Black Girl Scouts, to be effective, would need to resemble a “scared straight” environment, which allows the state to supply it’s ad hoc patriarchal figure, or in the case of the Girl Scouts, a matriarchal figure.

Compounding the problem, the actual parental figure of the black girls, such as it is, would always let the troupe down as a participant, as black folks tend to do amongst each other, or even in integrated settings.

Imagine black girls going to a scout meeting in trashy clothes, gang-type apparel, snide attitudes, and so on.

Girl Scouts are intended to teach girls how to achieve in a modern civilized setting, not how to act civilized from the get-go. They teach self-reliance, contradicting the old-timey negro shorthand of victim/victimization.

* The Philippines was a Spanish colony for 380 years and for all intents and purposes, social stratification follows the pattern familiar to those who know Spanish speaking societies in the New World. The spectrum of their social hierarchy goes from Peninsulares (born in Spain), Insulares (Spanish speaking Filipino pure-blood whites born in the islands) to Mestizos, Chinos, Indios, Negritos,and various combinations thereof.

In other words, there is a social premium attached to being more white, just as in Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela and other Latin American countries. While the Spanish language has largely disappeared after a century of American colonialism and independent self-rule, I have always been struck by how Latin the Philippines is in its feel, when I have visited on business.

This would explain the phenomenon you note.

Pure-blood Indians in India on the other hand, always looked down on the small group of mixed race Indians born of admixture before the British started importing their brides from the British Isles, starting in the 1820s. These people , the Anglo-Indians—also looked down on by the British—Indian in appearance but European in their values and outlook, have almost entirely emigrated to the Anglophone white countries—the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

* A Black guy named W. Kamau Bell bashes Portland for being too White and not Black enough.

Like a typical African American, for Kamau the whole world has to revolve around Blackness, diggity Black Blackity Black.

Kamau won’t be satisfied until all big cities in The U.S racially look like Jackson, Mississippi.

* I organized and ran a Boy Scout troop for years. It was sponsored by our local Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod). We tried to involve the sons of a local Mexican family that lived in the orange grove down the street. They couldn’t afford the physical and uniforms so I paid for them. I thought this would be a good way to help mainstream them.

When we called the first organizational meeting, a gruffy-looking single man in his 40s showed up. He said he liked working with boys. We fathers took one look at him and said, “No way is this guy going into the woods on overnights with our sons …!” Now, in the interests of diversity, it appears that not only homosexual youth are invite to join, but troops can be led by openly homosexual adult males. (What is the Boy Scout leadership thinking?) The Mexican boys attended a few meetings/events and then dropped out.

I wouldn’t touch the Boy Scouts today, and our church would probably refuse sponsorship. It seems that there is an official narrative associated with supporting diversity … and this includes cultural Marxism, feminism, LGBT, and everything else that affronts traditional WASP/Christian/European values. Reaching out to minority groups with this narrative will not enlarge the base for scouting. What the cultural Marxists miss is that this narrative alienates White males. They are now more likely to drop out than the Hispanics. It is a form of organizational suicide. Let the Boy Scouts (and Girl Scouts for that matter) expire in peace.

* Charlotte Allen: All women’s organizations will eventually become feminist organizations, if they haven’t done so already. (The only exceptions: explicitly anti-feminist groups such as Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum). That means that they will eventually institutionalize the relentless antagonism toward men that is feminism’s hallmark.

Even conservative women eventually succumb. Witness the accusations of “misogyny” leveled at Donald Trump by prominent conservative-movement women. The word “misogyny” is pure feminist-speak. Or the effort to drum Schlafly out of the Eagle Forum–her own organization–because of her support for Trump.

Or the fact that nearly all movement-conservative women jumped onto the bandwagon of feminist condemnation of Todd Akin over his hapless remark in 2012 that few victims of “legitimate” rape get pregnant. Not a single supposedly pro-life woman pointed out that Akin was trying to distinguish between actual rape and the kind of regretted sex pushed by feminists as “rape culture,” and that a single one-off street rape is as likely to result in pregnancy as any other single one-off sexual encounter: it can happen, but it’s statistically more likely that it won’t. Akin indeed killed his candidacy with his poor choice of words, but it would have been nice if a single movement-conservative woman had exhibited a little understanding of what he was talking about instead of immediately huffing and puffing in SJW indignation along with the professional feminists.

Women are super-conformists, and since there is always a certain amount of natural antagonism between the sexes, it’s inevitable that most women will pick up the feminist rhetoric of high-status women, nearly all of whom are feminists. It’s the invasion of the body-snatchers.

* Indian women are (obviously) darker than white women and so appear–first glance–less feminine than white women to a white man, simply based on the basic feminine fair, masculine dark schema.

However, Indian women are a product of the third great civilization–after the West and China–so they have created\selected down through the eons in a civilized patriarchal society to fulfill the feminine role. There are some specific differences you can point to–less severe winter, caste endogamy, arranged marriages–that have no-doubt subtly affected selection relative to whites. But basically Indian women, like white women and Asian women are the products of thousands of years of a selection process that creates “feminine” women, because in civilization women depend on male labor and men value feminine women and so feminine women reproduce.

Black women in contrast are the product of a selection process outside of civilization, where they mostly supported themselves with tropical hoeing and gardening agriculture and did not depending on male labor for their survival. This selects for a much less feminine–more “bitchy” or more “difficult”–personality, as well as poor marriage stability and the matrilineal child support (“fostering out”) pattern.

Whether a guy finds Indian women attractive–personal taste. But darker skin != non-feminine. Indian women’s average femininity is pretty much in the same ballpark as white women. All the flirting, signaling, cues, desires, male and female roles, dominance and submission work exactly as you would expect.

* The Boy Scouts IIRC stemmed from Baden Powell’s experience during the siege of Mafeking in the Boer War, what he took from that was great admiration for the Boer’s resiliency, well rounded skills (e.g., marksmanship, the notion of “three on a match” stemmed from here), and ability to live off the land. So part — if not more than part — was to create an organization that would foster these kinds of traits in English boys who had largely lost their survivalist roots.

The analogy for Americans would involve the relationship of the standard urban/suburban American with frontiersmen of previous ages.

I would expect therefore that the Girl Scouts started later with a view to complement the Boy Scouts, which means that the Girl Scouts would need to be trained in the same kind of survivalist skills, including the development of stamina, teamwork, and so on.

Going back to Baden Powell, he was not the first person to develop a crusade to toughen up and develop young boys for paramilitary purposes, or for the development of “virtue”, i.e., in the sense of manliness, being preceded by at least one, Friedrich Jahn, or Father Jahn as I learned from my German PE teacher, who invented modern gymnastics after the Germans were severely defeated by Napoleon.

But I think part of the problem is that teaching young men virtue and well-roundedness (the fabled “arete” of the Greeks) doesn’t seem ot be part of anyone’s curriculum anymore. The fact that few go into military service might be part of it, the fact that people are only guided into fields that will make larger salaries seems part of it, but whatever it is, there doesn’t seem to be much of a premium on a man’s ability to survive and get by in the wild or on minimum resources as there used to be.

For these reasons I think the Boy Scouts have questionable relevance today, because actually we aren’t training, because we aren’t rewarding, young men who have mastered traditional masculine skills: we are rewarding young men who do well on SAT tests.

* Viewed from another perspective, the Girl Scouts are a cookie selling business with an exploited, unpaid child labor force.

This explains:

1. Why they toe the line on SJW propriety – left wing organizations can get away with this kind of stuff but for badwhite cults the government enforces the letter of the law.

2. The concern with complying with forms and laws – if they somehow cross the line on #1 despite their best efforts, they want to show that they did everything by the book in order stay out of jail.

* Now, in the interests of diversity, it appears that not only homosexual youth are invite to join, but troops can be led by openly homosexual adult males. (What is the Boy Scout leadership thinking?)

It’s not thinking. It’s responding to a 30+ year long assault on freedom of assembly. Someone here mentioned the Rotary Club. Well it used to be all male until it fought a court battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court in which they were forced to admit women. The Boy Scouts actually won their court battle to deny gays, but by then the writing was on the wall. The corporate fascists who now run the world are all too happy to destroy anything that stands in their way, and that includes freedom of assembly. They began denying funds to the BSA, and the BSA was forced to relent. I would suspect that there are still plenty of church-sponsored BSA troops that still succeed in keeping out the creeps, though.

* When I was raising my kids in a suburb of Boston 10 years ago the Cub Scouts still seemed pretty healthy. Most of my sons’ troop’s activities consisted of science experiments, camping trips, overnights at Battleship cove, trips to see the PawSox, etc. Very much boy friendly fun activities, and there were about 20-25 kids any given year. Maybe the fact that our troop was about 95% Jewish (I think we were the only goyim) created more cohesion and purpose than other posters seem to be finding.

* The saving grace of the Girl Scouts is that they are still fairly decentralized. Most of the actual activities of actual Girl Scouts is determined by the (volunteer) Troop Leaders, or in other words, parents (mainly mothers). Good leaders make a good Troop. Good Girl Scout experiences are still available, but it depends (as so much else) on good people and to a lesser extent, good location.

That said, it is true that the national (and to a lesser extent regional) organizations are Left-Feminist, but I would characterize it as more of the corporate-type of Left-Feminism than the SJW type. The national organization does not exert that much influence over the individual troops. Not that they are not trying, but as mentioned, the troops are mostly run by the volunteer Troop Leaders who mostly are grown up former Girl Scouts and mostly reiterate what they did growing up, so the Nationals don’t get the look-in they would like.

The National/Regionals also levy a heavy tax on the cookie sales. Most of the cookies’ sale price ends up going to that useless overclass of paper-pushing parasites. The Troop doing the actual selling only gets a few pennies on the dollar. Once my Troop realized this, they lost interest in selling cookies for the (wo)Man.

It is understandable to want to bypass the GS and go with some alternative, and in many cases this may be the right way to go. The GS, however, has an enormous installed base of legacy infrastructure, both tangible and intangible, that none of the alternatives, so far as I know, can yet match. Campsites, headquarters buildings, relationships with other organizations, both domestically and internationally, the brand recognition of the “Scouts” name, all this is the accumulation of over a century of work and goodwill. It is not easy to replace. Ideally, it would be good to take back the Scouts. But I think that (as so much else) has to await a cultural formation where traditional values can sound nice to modern ears.

* Social mores are as just as restrictive as they were fifty plus years ago. And one can lose their job and social standing if one violates them. The only difference between now and fifty plus years ago is that the mores have changed.

* I believe Baden-Powell’s vision for the scouts was that it would generate non denominational good will among Christian sects and I believe Jews as well. We forget about how hung up our grandparents were with Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Anglicans, ….. heaven forbid Jews intermarrying.

Scouting was “citizenist” long before Steve Sailer was born.

For Jews in particular however, Scouting presented a problem. First of all was the whole Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality obsession but that did not happen until post WWII.

But I think Kevin MacDonald is also right, Scouting was/is a clear threat to the “A People that Shall Dwell Alone” Jewish group evolutionary strategy right from its inception.

Back in the 70s/80s there was a sociologist/rabbi regular contributor for the NYRB who was obsessed with the preservation of Jewish ethnocentrism and harped on how Jewish parents who let their kids join goyim dominated scout troops were threat to future Jewish identity.

Therefore I thought you might find this tidbit interesting:

Large Georgia Camp Taken over for Jewish Girl Scouts

August 1, 1930
Atlanta (Jul. 31)

Camp Civitania, of north Georgia, which is owned by the Atlanta Girl Scout organization and is one of the biggest of its kind in the southeast, will be taken over for the entire month of August as an exclusive camp for Jewish Girl Scouts.

The ACLU has spent decades trying to destroy the BSA. Every wonder what their real agenda was?