I’ve been reading Robert Lindsay’s blog—he’s a total badass of a contrarian, stark raving mad in a good way, and a self-identified Stalinist, mentioned favorably by TGGP). He is a feminist-hating feminist, a liberal humanist who supports far-left totalitarian repression, and an anti-racist/anti-fascist White Supremacist—among other things. Literally a mad genius.
Anyway, what I want to mention is that, from the remarks of a guest poster there, I extrapolated what looks like a succint, plausible and non-mind-killed explanation of why, paradoxically, African-American communities in the U.S. have been in such a tragic state since segregation began to fade away in the 60s:
The origin of such ghettos can be traced back to segregation. Some of these communities thrived at a time and were fairly self-sufficient. The Black middle class fled these places. And all that was left behind were the poor and a crumbling society. The middle class Blacks might have served as role models to those less fortunate. The Whites didn’t care about them either. Everyone that could afford to get out, got out.
Duuuude. I think that hits the nail on the head. Evaporative cooling! When the segregation and anti-black sentiment are weakened but still in effect, of course it’d be the brightest, best socialized and most driven blacks who would break through the weakening celling, but the majority of blacks would remain an isolated community, suffering constant brain drain and hardly any “brain input” (from non-black assistance to the community, etc).
Of course, the traditional Black matriarchal family morphing into an unstable single-mom variant is another, far better known, cause of the clusterfuck—but it’s startling how evaporative cooling demonstrates a direct causal link between what I’d call “desegregation for the top 10%” and the loss of those 10%’s contribution.
(P.S.: I do not endorse anything those guys say about “spoilt” American women and the “aggression” of mainstream feminism, etc—that has a grain of truth to it, but, as always, geeky American contrarian young men on the internet take that grain of truth and bury it under narrow-minded parochial whining. Looking from a Second World country, if anything screams “spoiled” to me, it’s ye olde MRA rant. But I digress.)
(P.P.S.: oh damn, his attitude to masculinity and male sexuality is also schizophrenic, but in a really bad, no-good, awful way. I’m torn between laughter and disgust. Is he trying to imitate Orwell? Is that just full-on trolling? …Sigh, I guess that’s the admission price he’s charging.)
Why doesn’t this apply to every minority? For example, when anti-Semitism broke down, why didn’t it leave behind little Jewish ghettos of swirling social dysfunction and failure as the best Jews escaped into goyish society? Why not any Asian group? etc.
Jewish culture has a very strong and extremely ancient tradition of networking and giving to the community, one that Afro-Americans lack. With Asian-Americans it’s largely similar, plus consider that the Asian immigrants to the US must have already been the most driven and novelty-seeking of their class back home.
U.S. Blacks carry a unique history of slavery and such. They did not know how to choose between cooperation and defection, because sticking together had never been a choice before.
Pretty much every culture has a tradition of networking and giving to the community, and African-Americans are no exception—think of the powerful networks of black churches which were behind the civil rights movement.
The origin of such ghettos can be traced back to segregation. Some of these communities thrived at a time and were fairly self-sufficient. The Black middle class fled these places. And all that was left behind were the poor and a crumbling society. The middle class Blacks might have served as role models to those less fortunate. The Whites didn’t care about them either. Everyone that could afford to get out, got out.
I think that hits the nail on the head. Evaporative cooling! When the segregation and anti-black sentiment are weakened but still in effect, of course it’d be the brightest, best socialized and most driven blacks who would break through the weakening celling, but the majority of blacks would remain an isolated community, suffering constant brain drain and hardly any “brain input” (from non-black assistance to the community, etc).
If this is model is correct then we should expect it to also work when dealing with class. If so it might explain the rise of the native British underclass, as the old culturally enforced class barriers where lessened by meritocracy in the early 20th century, evaporative cooling ensured the remaining lower class suffered more and more social pathologies.
If Charles Murray’s Coming Apart case that such a cultural divergence between classes is taking place in America is correct, we should be able to make a few predictions about the near term social future of that country. At a glance these predictions seem plausible as they match most current recorded trends.
Let us leave aside problems with utilitarianism for the sake of argument and ask does this automatically mean we have a net gain in utility? The answer seems to be no. A transfer of wealth and quality of life not just from the less deserving to the more deserving but from the lower and lower middle class to the upper classes. If people basically get the position in society they deserve in life they are also costing people around them positive (or negative) externalities. Meritocratic societies have proven fabulously good at creating wealth and because of our impulses nearly all of them seem to have instututed expensive welfare programs. But consider what welfare is in the real world, a centralized attempt often lacking in feedback or flexibility, it can never match the local positive externalities of competent/nice/smart people solving problems they see around themselves. Those people simply don’t exist any more in those social groups! If someone was trying to get pareto optimal solutions this seems incredibly silly and harmful!
With humans at least centralized efforts don’t ever seem to be as efficient a way to help them as would just settling a good mix of talented poor with them.
I’ve been reading Robert Lindsay’s blog—he’s a total badass of a contrarian, stark raving mad in a good way, and a self-identified Stalinist, mentioned favorably by TGGP). He is a feminist-hating feminist, a liberal humanist who supports far-left totalitarian repression, and an anti-racist/anti-fascist White Supremacist—among other things. Literally a mad genius.
Anyway, what I want to mention is that, from the remarks of a guest poster there, I extrapolated what looks like a succint, plausible and non-mind-killed explanation of why, paradoxically, African-American communities in the U.S. have been in such a tragic state since segregation began to fade away in the 60s:
Duuuude. I think that hits the nail on the head. Evaporative cooling! When the segregation and anti-black sentiment are weakened but still in effect, of course it’d be the brightest, best socialized and most driven blacks who would break through the weakening celling, but the majority of blacks would remain an isolated community, suffering constant brain drain and hardly any “brain input” (from non-black assistance to the community, etc).
Of course, the traditional Black matriarchal family morphing into an unstable single-mom variant is another, far better known, cause of the clusterfuck—but it’s startling how evaporative cooling demonstrates a direct causal link between what I’d call “desegregation for the top 10%” and the loss of those 10%’s contribution.
(P.S.: I do not endorse anything those guys say about “spoilt” American women and the “aggression” of mainstream feminism, etc—that has a grain of truth to it, but, as always, geeky American contrarian young men on the internet take that grain of truth and bury it under narrow-minded parochial whining. Looking from a Second World country, if anything screams “spoiled” to me, it’s ye olde MRA rant. But I digress.)
(P.P.S.: oh damn, his attitude to masculinity and male sexuality is also schizophrenic, but in a really bad, no-good, awful way. I’m torn between laughter and disgust. Is he trying to imitate Orwell? Is that just full-on trolling? …Sigh, I guess that’s the admission price he’s charging.)
Why doesn’t this apply to every minority? For example, when anti-Semitism broke down, why didn’t it leave behind little Jewish ghettos of swirling social dysfunction and failure as the best Jews escaped into goyish society? Why not any Asian group? etc.
Good try anyway.
Jewish culture has a very strong and extremely ancient tradition of networking and giving to the community, one that Afro-Americans lack. With Asian-Americans it’s largely similar, plus consider that the Asian immigrants to the US must have already been the most driven and novelty-seeking of their class back home.
U.S. Blacks carry a unique history of slavery and such. They did not know how to choose between cooperation and defection, because sticking together had never been a choice before.
Pretty much every culture has a tradition of networking and giving to the community, and African-Americans are no exception—think of the powerful networks of black churches which were behind the civil rights movement.
If this is model is correct then we should expect it to also work when dealing with class. If so it might explain the rise of the native British underclass, as the old culturally enforced class barriers where lessened by meritocracy in the early 20th century, evaporative cooling ensured the remaining lower class suffered more and more social pathologies.
If Charles Murray’s Coming Apart case that such a cultural divergence between classes is taking place in America is correct, we should be able to make a few predictions about the near term social future of that country. At a glance these predictions seem plausible as they match most current recorded trends.
This seems related to matters discussed in my public draft on Meritocracy and the comment section there: