We pay lots of taxes, support immigration restrictions

The sort of restrictions that would have prevented you from emigrating to the US?

You should be happy. The guy is Indian, probably the offspring of an immigrant or H-1B worker.

So Denmark is a homogeneous country. And a happy country. So what? Singapore is not homogeneous, yet it is happy.

Your entire worldview seems to be built around the recognition and celebration of natural impulses. If people are naturally attracted towards (or trust) members of their tribe, or people who look like them, then that’s the only way human societies ought to organize themselves. Tribally!

Yet the entire history of civilization has been one of suppressing one’s natural impulses to build larger and larger tents. And guess what; it succeeded. Religion was the first attempt at such “large-tent civilization”, and it’s still the most powerful social force on the planet. Acculturation in any society (as long as it is done with purpose) always breeds trust among its members. The examples you keep bringing up to justify your worldview involve societal breakdowns in response to contingent historical events (like in Yugoslavia and Iraq.) Because people behave in a certain way when they land in trouble does not mean they must behave that way all the time. Unless such behavior (tribal/ethnic solidarity with distrust towards outsiders) is the end you desire.

You do realize that “Jew” and “Muslim” are not races, and that cultural differences account for different outcomes? I know that goes against the catechism being recited constantly on this blog, but still, you got to be “noticing” this stuff, no?

Were you high when you read my comment? Where did I hail the wonders of multiculturalism? If anything, I was optimistically pushing for a uniculture that is not based on kinship, but rather comes into being through cultural conditioning (like assimiliation). and I gave examples of how this has been achieved many times in the history of civilization. Indeed, civilization itself is such a process that rebelled against purely Darwinian instincts (though we can never get rid of those, of course.)

Learn to read, pea-brain. I never said only white people should not organize themselves tribally. I am an equal opportunity offender (assuming protesting against tribalism is an offense, which seems to be a widely held opinion hereabouts). My post was an anti-tribalism screed.

Indeed in the country from whence D’Souza comes, racial domination shaped an elaborate caste system imposed by the Indo-German invaders on the darker-skinned older settler population– about four thousand years ago.

Please do not perpetuate this myth. This is one hypothesis of what may have happened long ago in the Indian subcontinent. Other theories have been proposed which are as likely (or unlikely), given all the evidence we have today at our disposal. From genetics, linguistics, and archaeology, there is evidence both to support this theory and to invalidate it. Color of the skin matter in today’s India, but the causes of that cannot be directly attributed to a fancied ancient invasion of white people on black. The past millenia consists of a series of invasions by lighter-skinned outsiders (Central and West Asians, followed by the British), which have to have had some impact in shaping Indians’ color prejudice. As for caste, every society in the world has had it. Indian (Hindu) society just made it more formal and codified than others. And there is no evidence to suggest that it was based on skin color. If you don’t trust Indian epics and records, you can look at Greek records from around the 3rd century BC; if society had then been stratified by color, they would have been sure to mention it, which they don’t.

PS: If you are interested in Indian history beyond simplistic takeaway points (like the one I have quotes above from your post), you could do worse than to read the posts of your prolific fellow blogger, Razib Khan. He knows something about the topic, and would cringe at the description you have given above.

Contrary to D’Souza’s contentions, racism is not a modern invention that came along in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Though my contempt for Dinesh D’Souza’s “scholarship” probably matches yours, I think the above quote is a misreading of his statements. Clearly racial discrimination has been with us since the dawn of civilization if you treat the words “race” and “tribe” as synonymous. Here, it seems to me that Dinesh is specifically talking about white-nonwhite racism, which acquired a pseudo-scientific basis in the 18th and 19th centuries and was used as a justification for endless colonialism by European powers. And to the American mind, the word racism is virtually synonymous with white-nonwhite discrimination, where whites are imbued with positive qualities and nonwhites with negative ones. The “end of racism” that Dinesh talks about probably refers to the fact that is is completely “uncool” or even atypical for modern Americans to discriminate purely on the basis of skin color (now culture is different; someone who behaves like a gangsta will be treated accordingly.)

I believe in the Indo-European expansion, though am not completely sold on the conventional version (that it started out in Ukraine or thereabouts; the origins are murky). Anyone who has read about the relations between the languages has to believe in such an expansion.

I’m not so sure there was an “Aryan Invasion” though. Maybe it was an invasion, maybe it was gradual demographic dominance. We don’t have all the proof. The proof for an outright invasion followed by the establishment of a caste society to reduce admixture between the immigrant and native populations is, to put it kindly, light. And we keep coming up with new archaeological and genetic facts. Read Razib’s posts occasionally for info. That there were just two significantly different races that came into violent contact with each other long ago in the subcontinent is a theory put forward (in the 19th century) to explain how a rigid caste system came about (this theory is not substantiated by any sort of material evidence, but just happens to meet the plausibility bar.) There is more evidence of 3 (or perhaps more) racial groups colliding in the subcontinent. The linguistics evidence is also not a slam dunk for the invasion theory.

I am not a subscriber of Hindutva, and generally have mild contempt for those folks. But they are nationalists. Why they suspend reason and refuse to believe in any aspect of the Indo-European expansion (and not just the Aryan Invasion theory) is that the latter theory was used throughout the colonial period by the British to justify their rule of India. Sort of like a Manifest Destiny, applied to the gradual British conquest of India (often with trickery, sometimes with brutality).

PS: I’ll be glad to continue this exchange if you would like to, but not if you use terms of abuse like “lunatic”. Otherwise, hope you have a great day!

The average Russian probably stinks at chess, but Russia as a whole produces chess geniuses, and a lot of Grandmasters. Similarly, the average Indian very likely stinks at math, but the people who are lining up for STEM jobs (the college graduates) will probably beat Shanghai-China. In both cases, what you see is the cream of the crop, a selected bunch of people from a large population who have come through a brutally competitive system.

There’s a related precedent here. India faced a massive refugee crisis in the late 60s/early 70s when persecuted Bangladeshis (i.e., by the Pakistanis) flooded into the country. The Indian response was to have their army train the refugees to eventually fight for independence. And it worked. Bangladesh got independent and almost all the refugees returned home.
(Now, this was, of course, vehemently opposed by Nixon and Kissinger, who almost came to the point of declaring war on India. Cold War politics!)

The Sailer Strategy instead is for Americans to be honest with each other about how they are playing Hot Potato with each other.

And what exactly is your position on this? You don’t openly say, here or in other posts, whether you approve or disapprove. Given the tenor of your blog posts on other topics (on race and HBD in particular) I, like Millman, suspect the former.

One of my major arguments against immigration is water conservation.

On this forum, anything and everything is an argument against immigration, so the above is a non sequitor. That said, immigrants (of the non-white kind, the kind you dislike) come from places that have suffered resource crunches for a long time, so they are used to living off much less (especially water). So this particular anti-immigrant argument is weaker than the other anti-immigrant arguments bandied about in these parts.

See comment #45.

Or, the people who do feel ripped off by Slim and his ilk are the ones trying to emigrate to the US. If so, that might tell a different story about the future of inequality in the US.

“South Africa and Sweden”???

Steve, you seem to really hate Acemoglu. I read your review of his (and Robinson’s) book, and you completely mischaracterize his thesis. I guess any theory of human and societal variation that does not lay heavy emphasis on race and genetics really bothers you.

In this particular sentence, there is nothing problematic about using South Africa and Sweden in the same sentence, but you jumped to a pre-conceived conclusion because of your bias. He is not positing a similarity between the two countries, but rather a contrast. He is a big fan of the Swedish model and says Sweden is a successful country because their institutions are fair and inclusive. He is critical of the South African model, which has always been built on an explicit racial hierarchy; he calls that an exclusive institution and shows that concentrating all political and economic power in the hands of white people results in blacks getting poorer and black communities getting more dysfunctional. This is obvious and should be non-controversial, but I am not sure you see it that way.

“Institutions” in Acemoglu’s parlance is just shorthand for how people in a society treat each other. If they treat each other fairly, trust each other, and deal honestly with each other, he says the institution is “inclusive” and such a society will do well for itself and its members; If they treat each other badly, establish hierarchies, indulge in dishonest behavior, and have a very small circle of trust, the society and most of its people (all except the elite) will do pretty badly. There is no evidence to correlate IQ with how a person treats another; it’s completely based on how one is socially conditioned, which in itself is based on the history of that society/culture. Relatively dumb people in a high-trust and egalitarian society can do well for themselves and make progress too.

Didn’t work for me in Firefox, but did in Chrome.

Perhaps I AM dense. But other commenters also seemed to think that Steve was accusing Acemoglu of saying that Sweden and SA were similar in some way. If so, he should have elaborated, as Acemoglu’s point was clear.

The comparisons you make are silly. In a rich country, even slaves will be relatively prosperous compared to average people in poor, resource-starved countries. What matters is not how rich people are in absolute terms but how they fare relative to their neighbors; the latter can only be achieved through inclusive institutions, according to Acemoglu. Blacks never did well in places like Detroit and Johannesburg; the decline you lament is in the condition of white people in those places; blacks are marginally better off there compared to how they were under Jim Crow and apartheid.

LOL….I am not Acemoglu, but I’ll take it as a compliment. 🙂

I believe Acemoglu is aware of Sailer and noted the TakiMag review in one of his articles (though I can’t find the link now); from what I recall he called the review “vicious” and left it at that.

If any of you have read his book (and I think Steve Sailer just read a small portion and didn’t bother with the rest), you’ll see that he provides a lot of examples that indicate (though not to a scientific certainty) how institutions trump race, North Korea vs South Korea being an obvious example.
He also talks a lot about Botswana (black African country with black people) having inclusive institutions, the result of which is that people there seem to live well. Now I know next to nothing about Botswana, but I have also not seen Acemoglu’s claims about it being debunked anywhere.

Acemoglu also says exactly the same things about Carlos Slim and how he got ahead by gaming Mexico’s extractive institutions. One would think Steve would find common cause with Acemoglu on this point.

But it’s not much fun arguing with you folks on this topic. You see white people doing well (generally speaking) and black people doing badly (again generally speaking) at this point in human history, and you attribute it all to race, genetics, evolution, etc. It almost rises to the level of religious belief for you. And one can’t argue against religious belief.

How do you know Sweden is inclusive towards its Muslim immigrants? Allowing people in and letting them establish ghettos is not inclusion. Inclusion is about giving everyone a fair shot and having non-discriminatory rules (even unwritten ones). Clannishness implies exclusivity, as Acemoglu puts it. How do you know Swedes are not clannish towards these Muslim outsiders? If one of the latter were to go apply for a job, or a place in a university, there could be subtle discrimination (regardless of what the laws on the books say).

Acemoglu posits Botswana as an example of black people doing well under a black government. Now that’s obviously not sufficient proof to conclude anything either way, but asserting that black people faring badly under black governments is completely attributable to blackness is far more unscientific. Correlation is not causation.

What is obvious to a poor thinker is usually not so to a better thinker.

To anyone who is not a part of the echo chamber that is this blog, the “thinking” that goes on here seems quite poor. To reduce everything to race and genetics is lazy and self-serving (i.e., for a white person who needs an ego boost.)

Definitely the Swedish model model worked petty well for Sweden because everyone was white, had shared kinship, shared language, and shared culture. No one denies this. What I said about South Africa is perfectly consistent with this. White South Africans have always been extremely clannish and set up the institutions of their country to serve only whites, with blacks only allowed to serve cheap labor functions. It is no wonder that blacks didn’t end up well off. And in modern south Africa, trust between blacks and whites is almost nil, and it’s well-nigh impossible establish any kind of inclusive institutions. To the ambitious and smarter blacks, it makes much more sense to inveigle themselves into the white-controlled economy than to fight for inclusiveness, the result of which will be a much smaller share of the pie for everyone. All this is common sense. And it’s also all about race, with whites having high solidarity and clannishness but blacks being too large and tribally fragmented to think of doing anything other that which will benefit their near and dear ones.

Correlation requires explanation.

And explanations ought to be based on scientific, not magical, thinking.

Some facts:

— The Bantu emigrated to northern South Africa before the Boers did. The Boers remained in the Cape Colony for more than 2 centuries until they trekked north to get away from British imperial rule. and that’s when they clashed with the Zulu and Xhosa tribes (and of course won, as their fighting technology was far superior). While the Boers were living in the Cape, the natives (Khoisan/Hottentots) either assimilated (to become the Cape Colored population) or died out. The Bantu did not emigrate to South Africa to be near whites, and definitely not to work as cheap labor.

— In the 20th century, a lot of Africans have emigrated to South Africa, but they have come from further north (like Nigeria). South Africa is definitely the most advanced economy in all of sub-saharan Africa, and that owes a lot to the British, who connected that country to the global capital system in the early 20th century.

In any case, what people desire is to be well-off relative to other people who live close to them. Even if the average black south African eats a better mean than the average Congolese, while being a low-wage laborer forced to live in ghettos and forbidden free movement (as was mandatory under apartheid), that does not imply he lives well.

“Reverse discrimination” will invite “reverse reverse discrimination”, and the cycle will continue. Time to give it a rest.

Suppose it can be shown that Race A is stronger, more impulsive, more aggressive, and more psychopathic than Race B.

Do you mean every member of Race A is stronger, etc. than every member of Race B?

Surely not. I’ll assume you are talking about averages. Assuming impulsiveness, aggressiveness, and psychopathy are normally distributed within a particular race, what you have are two normal distributions (or two bell curves) that crest at different values but which largely overlap. Unless the averages are very different, the overlaps are going to be large, meaning most members of the two races are going to be statistically indistinguishable from each other. Yet the tail of Race A will be responsible for most aggressive crime (on members of Race B as well as the other members of Race A). But that’s not sufficient cause to indict every member of Race A as a derelict, which is what your racist policies would do.

If a bear can get elected President, it’s hard to make the case that all of them must be put in a place that’s “off-limits to most people.”

White people have a big problem: divisions.

Whites invaded most of the world and colonized a big part of it during the 18th and 19th century. In EVERY invaded or colonized country, a racial code was established so that one set of rules applied to whites and another to the rest.
Yes, the “problem” that white people have is internal divisions. Nice theory to avoid dwelling on your personal inadequacies and failures to achieve anything in life.

Equality is a bitch, eh?

White people don’t have any “problems”. You all live pretty good lives by the standards of the past, and of most of the world today. Honestly, this website often feels like a forum where teenagers (who are of course all-knowing) complain about how their mommy and daddy are keeping them down.

How many Indians were involved in these crimes? Based on what I have read: zero.

Would you like to be clumped in with Mexican peasants under a useless “North American” category? The term South Asian is just as meaningless.

Yeah, whites suffer loss of basic freedoms when non-whites gain independence from white rule. Such white rule having been established through invasion and conquest. But of course, the world must bend to the needs of whites, the rest be damned.

This website resembles Stormfront more and more with every passing day.

When was the United States every a completely white country (like, say, Denmark)? There have always been sizeable numbers of native Americans, blacks, and mestizos. Are you planning on kicking them all out?
Unless “white” is a cultural (and not a racial) term to you. But then, non-whites can and do get acculturated to American norms.
Either way, your hankering for a white United States makes little sense.

You had a Chinese/Indian PhD neighbor who put lead in your kids’ toys?

Are Haitians really hankering for a black Haiti? I seriously doubt they’d kick up a fuss if some retired white Americans decided to settle there for the climate and did some useful development work.

But seriously, yeah, I’d probably ask that question of the people of those countries too if they focused on racial characteristics. Now if Americans demanded an English-speaking US or Japanese demanded a Japanese-speaking Japan, I’d have no problem with it, and wouldn’t be puzzled about it. Cultural comfort I totally get. And I’m a sort-of-utopian that believes good cultural attributes spread and triumph over bad cultural attributes through contact and spread of knowledge. Sealing borders tight and preventing contact between peoples retards that process. Also, unlike just about everyone who comments on this blog, I am not convinced that race determines cognitive or behavioral attributes competely; nurture and environment can, and occasionally do, trump nature.

Indonesia was Hindu before it became Muslim. Even today, there’s a significant Hindu minority in the country; I believe some regions/islands are wholly Hindu. Most of South-East Asia (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia) were Hindu or Buddhist or a mix of the two until the spread of Islam. That older religious heritage might explain why the people there are not as fanatic as their Middle-Eastern co-religionists.

Arab radicalism is mostly a 20th century phenomenon. Well, there’s been some radicalism in the desert since Wahhab started preaching in the 18th century, but that remained in the desert until WWI.

And while Turks may seem sedate compared to Arabs today, for most of Islamic history, they were the ultimate crazies. Arab imperialism itself pretty much stopped after Poitiers (in the West) and the conquest of Persia in the East; i.e., by the 8th century (yes, I know there were Moorish corsairs in the Mediterranean, but that was disorganized piracy, not imperialism.) From the 10th century onwards, it was the Central Asian steppe nomads (mostly the Turks, but Mongols too) who kept invading their settle neighbors and committing barbaric acts. Pretty much all the Islamic Invasions of India were by Turks (with Afghan soldiers); Byzantium was conquered and colonized by Turks, not Arabs. Timur/Tamerlane, a particularly brutal campaigner, was a Turk. Etcetera.

As for Persians vs Arabs, I think the former would make better friends than the latter, and it’s in America’s interests to kiss and make up with the Mullahs in Tehran. If you want a fight, pick one with the Saudis, who are the ultimate benefactors of every bunch of Islamic crazies now roaming the planet.

I consider all such mass invaders to be barbarians; Alexander and Genghis Khan included. Some were better than others, but only in degree. So I’m not blaming (only) Islam for this.

When I said “Turk”, I meant historically Turkic peoples, not the present day residents of Anatolia. And yes, Timur and the early Mughals (Babar and Humayun) were Turks by ethnicity.

I think you might have stopped reading my comment after the first paragraph. I do mention Arab conquests in the West and East way back in the 7th and 8th centuries, and say that their depredations subsequently stalled, whereupon the Turks took over. I meant to connect that to what I had written in the first paragraph but forgot to do so.

Good points!

I think the decrease in homicide (and general violence) rates in European countries can partly be attributed to their shipping off malefactors to penal colonies (Australia, Virginia); and in general, letting violent people go commit their depredations on non-white people during the Worldwide Hunt For Colonies. A safety valve existed in all Western European societies from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, when it was finally not needed any more.

The one I know personally has a black father and a white mother. I suspect he’s fairly typical in that regard.

In modern America, perhaps. In 19th century America, Booker T. Washingtons and Frederick Douglasses were more common.

Western European man freed native women . Women were burned on their husband’s funeral pyre or buried alive until the British put a stop to it.

They also burned a few themselves while they were at it, in Salem, MA, among other places.

You make very nuanced observations about whites but paint the crudest caricatures of other races. And so do so many others on websites like these.

Who put an end to Indians throwing widows on pyres? Whites.

Partly right, mostly wrong. This is what you get when you read only a selection of essays, mostly by colonial and imperialist cheerleaders. For most part, the British preferred a hands off policy towards Indian customs, but in this case (burning widows alive), it was Indians who took the lead in trying to stamp it out. The administration, which was British, passed the law that outlawed this barbaric practice, but that hardly implies that “whites put an end to it” (as you put it.)

I’m quite sure bride burnings are counted in official murder figures. Female infanticide too, wherever cases are filed. Now a lot of what you call infanticide is actually gender-selective abortion (a terrible practice), so those wouldn’t count as murders in India or in any other country.

Libs like Numinous want to move the needle on the 1% of the web that’s like this place toward the other 99% of the web, where the crudest caricatures of whites and the most glowing portraiture of non-whites is iron law.

Nope, I’m a libertarian and an equal opportunity offender. I protest anti-white caricatures and glowing portrayals of non-white barbarians wherever I see them too. Though that’s rare on websites like these.

The indians who joined the british in condemning widow burning, such as Roy, were doing it under british cultural influence…

Agreed. I was just making a point against racial determinism.

– the media gave much coverage to the Catholic Church scandals, while it covered up the Pakistani pimps stories.

Is that really true, Steve? I thought the media only just got wind of this story, and it’s been given prominent coverage. The cover ups were perpetrated by the officialdom.

Or maybe I am wrong. Were there any news outlets that heard of these stories but refused to print them?

My guess is that the overwhelming majority of Indians live in liberal parts of the country dominated by SWPLs. Are Indians’ voting patterns that different from their white neighbors?

Therefore, a comparison between the murder rate in an 800 year old white society and literally any other society without similar variables is absolutely meaningless.

It’s incomplete, yes, but not meaningless. It shows that white societies changed from being aggressive violent societies to orderly, disciplined, and peaceful societies. Which implies that negative qualities like violence and aggression (well, negative unless you have to fight back an invader) cannot be attributed wholly to race and genes, and other factors (culture, environment, migrations, etc.) can result in deep societal changes. So other societies and races (who some whites consider irredeemably dysfunctional) could learn and gradually fix themselves.

So 400 K imported slaves have ballooned into 40 M people. Meanwhile around 45 M European immigrants have only enlarged to about 200 M people.

These numbers will change significantly if you discard the one-drop rule.

Humans have adapted to local circumstances in many different ways, and these adaptations involve mental traits with moderate to high heritability.

Maybe, and maybe not. The jury is still out on this, and research keeps going on. Making such sweeping statements is not useful. And if this were 100% true, it’s really an argument for people migrating to places with similar weather, environment, and ecology, and avoid migrating to other places. So much of the US then ought to be out-of-bounds for white people. But that would be stupid and illogical, wouldn’t it? The truth is, whatever selection pressures happened long ago, they have little use in modern times when human society now has the technological and emotional tools to deal with its surroundings. Any human can reside in any habitable part of the planet, so unproven assertions about evolution are not god justifications to prevent people migrations.

There is no known way to give people a greater capacity for guilt and empathy than what they already have.

You are probably correct, but this only applies to older children and adults, doesn’t it? Are you saying that babies or toddlers raised in different cultures from the ones they were born in do not possess capacities for guilt or empathy (assuming they were born in shame cultures)?

Haven’t people from European shame cultures (southern Italy and Greece for example) properly assimilated into American culture? Haven’t educated immigrants, and especially their children, from Asian countries assimilated well into American culture? The lack of anti-social behavior among these groups indicate that they have similar capacities for guilt and empathy that pedigreed WASPs do.

Also, as far as I know, the guilt-shame dichotomy was just a useful rule-of-the-thumb classification for a range of cultures. It was never meant to suggest that people raised in shame cultures cannot feel guilt. In fact, people in the Middle East and South Asia demonstrably feel guilt in various contexts; it’s just that those contexts may not make sense to modern Westerners. In this very article, you talk about Moroccan pimps avoiding Moroccan girls. But with so much opportunity to “corrupt” Moroccan girls in an anonymous fashion, what stops the pimps from doing so? Probably a good measure of guilt. another example: what kept the rigid caste system going for millenia in South Asia? Feelings of guilt and disgust at ritual pollution that was inculcated into people when they were kids.

I was casting doubt on a sweeping statement made by Mr. Frost, and not making one myself as you seem to imply. Doubtless humans have adapted to local circumstances; otherwise they would have died out or moved to greener pastures. Some of those adaptations may be reflected in the genetic code, but some of those are just passed on as culture from one generation to the next. And humans are a lot more malleable than you seem to allow for, especially young ones.

If humans have not adapted to local circumstances in many different ways with adaptations that involve mental traits with moderate to high heritability, then any problems that immigrants have must be due to the culture of a host society, and any problems fitting into the society that immigrants encounter due to the host societies being racist.

The only way to refute the accusation is to say that immigrants have different hereditary propensities, but if you do that you are in effect saying the immigrants are not interchangeable with the host population, which is racism.

Not at all. The culture the immigrants come from could exhibit serious pathologies. If immigrants come as individuals (or in nuclear families), they will try (or be forced) to assimilate into the host culture. If much larger groups immigrate en masse, they could end up in cultural ghettos if multiculturalism is the norm in the host society. Such immigrants will remain in their silos and not absorb the values of their new countries. So any bad behavior they exhibit cannot be blamed on racism. But neither can it be blamed on defective genes, not without ignoring various other factors.

Among many other questions that Open Borders types never get around to answering:
Do they think that Unions are “evil”?

I don’t know who you are talking about, but Unions have always been anathema to libertarians, and they have never been shy of saying so (every read Ayn Rand?)

Whether that’s advisable or not, I think most consciously-white immigration-restrictionists would jump for joy if America switched to an all-European immigration policy.

But that would immediately invalidate all the economic arguments against immigration, would it not? Competition in the job market is competition, whether it comes from Swedes or Somalis. And for people up the food chain, the former are a much bigger threat.

What would Braveheart do?

Shouldn’t people like Adam Smith, David Hume, the innumerable imperial adventurers and administrators, hell, even James I get more precedence than Braveheart? After all, much water has passed under the bridge since 1300 A.D.

And it’s quite irresponsible to encourage secession and tribalism, or even celebrate it. You wouldn’t want that to happen in the United States, would you? There are very good reasons (security and economies of scale being two very good ones) why different people came together to form countries, even at the cost of being moderately dominated by others. Anarchy and chronic insecurity could likely result from mass breakups, and not a set of self-contained idylls like you seem to imagine.

But did Mr Lee not, himself, say something in an interview a decade ago to the effect that in a pluralistic society, you vote based not on class or social interest, but in the end, on racial and religious ones? I believe he did.

Not exactly. He said that in a free-for-all electoral democracy, people would start to vote tribally. He used that argument to justify his soft dictatorship of Singapore. To him, a stable state with a unified purpose was the most important factor in the development of a country.

Reader didn’t really want to draw out the modern implications in the manner of J.P. Rushton, but it’s pretty obvious reading his book that there are connections between prehistoric Africa and inner city black America.

Steve, this is where you sort of lose me. When recent history of slavery and marginalization can explain (at least to some extent) the dysfunction of inner-city black America, why must we jump back many millenia to discover the supposed roots of those causes in tropical insects and pachyderms?

A very informative post!

You talk a lot about Western Europe and Eastern Asia, but what about other cultures? India was the birthplace of Jainism and Buddhism (arguably that makes India the birthplace of pacifism and vegetarianism as well.) Aren’t these signs of a culture where affective empathy is widespread? Yet India today is held up as a prime example of a shame culture where empathy is lacking. So what happened?

I was born and raised in India (and then spent a large part of my adult life in the West), and in my personal experience, empathy in Indian society is exactly the opposite of what it is in Chinese society, according to this article. Indians have a hard time expressing cognitive empathy but not feeling affective empathy. But then, I’m not a sociologist, and my experiences may not be truly representative.

Y’all need to read the parable about blind men discussing the characteristics of an elephant.

Outside of the Western world one is judged strictly by their race, ethnicity or religion, or a combination thereof.

That was the case in the West as well until 50 or so years ago, and definitely before WW II. Don’t project 21st century liberal values onto the past.

I am confused. Are you saying Jesus Christ and his teachings were not pacifist in nature? If so, I’ll flat out say you are wrong. And as I happen to agree with you that the West’s empathy is not grounded in pacifism, so then that empathy cannot be grounded in the Christian faith, can it? And nothing in your comment indicates why Christian empathy is fundamentally different from Buddhist empathy (but you seem to be asserting that, unless I am mistaken.) I’m not saying there is no difference; it’s just that the difference, if it exists, is not apparent to me.

Global warming activists don’t care to talk about (or limit) mass immigration because such immigration/emigration has very little effect on global climate.

If people in Third World countries are denied the chance to emigrate to rich countries, they are going to try and create little First World pockets within their homelands, often in a corrupt and unplanned manner; the net result will be at least as much increase in global temperatures as would have occurred had they emigrated.

Since the global warming activists have no effect on the popular discourse in poor countries (it’s hard to convince people to deny themselves modern comforts while letting people in the rich West live relatively lavish lifestyles), they find no reason to get worked up about mas immigration one way or the other. It’s just a very insignificant factor to them.

That’s the point. It’s insignificant to them, when — to anyone who actually (1) believes in AGW and (2) wants to fight it — it would be the obvious basis for an immediate and productive policy change.

Immigration restriction is THE ONLY way to lessen the problem without asking people to give up even the slightest bit of their “lavish lifestyles”.

No, it’s insignificant to them because it’s insignificant to combat the challenge of global warming, period (assuming you believe in global warming.) In the short term, American carbon footprint will rise, but it will eventually plateau out, irrespective of the population size. But the consumption of people in poorer countries will keep rising in an unplanned and haphazard manner; people there do not have (and will not have for the near future) any patience with global warming activists who try to preach to them.

The point I tried to make in my earlier comment was that it makes not a damned bit of difference to global warming whether or not there is immigration to rich countries. You are completely wrong when you say that immigration restriction is the only way to lessen the problem. Connecting immigration to global warming requires extremely tortured logic that can only be found on a vehemently anti-immigration website. You folks are focusing only on American consumption and American carbon footprints. Well, guess what, it “global warming” and not “American warming” we are dealing with. Reducing immigration will not result in a significant decrease in global temperatures, and neither will the status quo. So nothing you say here will have any effect on global warming activists, who are looking for other ways to combat the challenge.

Read Steve’s post, then respond as if you had. This thing where you comment as if the issues you’re talking about hadn’t been addressed in Steve’s post isn’t cute. It makes you look like a jackass. Or stupid, take your pick.

Steve’s post and his conclusions are based on the assumptions that: 1) every immigrant will continue to consume resources at the present average American rate ad infinitum, and 2) the source countries of the immigrants will not see any increases in consumption or in carbon footprints. I think both of these assumptions are wrong, and that’s what I based my comment on.

You sound like a smart person but you don’t seem to posses the ability for self-analysis and self-criticism. You are so mad about immigration that you will use and propagate any and every argument against it without bothering to critically analyze it.

Yet none of those Nonwhite people with Non Western names were in Steve Jobs garage in the 1970s to invent the first home computer. None of them had Indian accents or Chinese accents.

The point is there would be no Apple today if it wasn’t for a bunch of White guys.

So…….since there were no non-whites in that garage, no non-whites could ever have invented the equivalent of Apple.
And since a bunch of white guys invented Apple, therefore any bunch of white guys (but only white guys) could have invented something like Apple.

I sure hope you are not in a line of work where logic is applied on a daily basis.

Not surprising that Non Western people were not creative enough to create the first home computer. Chinese and Indians are good at copying things from the West, but not good at inventing things on their own.

Yeah, they are good at copying, just like 99.9% of American entrepreneurs copy from the remaining 0.1% (the identities of that 0.1% keeps changing, of course).

So what’s the point?

In the 1970s, both India and China were overwhelmingly poor (and India is very poor even today). What kind of a moron, however rich, smart and innovative, would try to invent a computing device that no one (not even the government people, who were troglodytes) would buy. And with all the socialist controls in place, where would such a person get the knowledge and equipment to even start?

There’s been enough discussion on these forums about how Bill Gates became Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs became Steve Jobs, and why, say, Elvis Presley did not become Gates or Jobs. Yet you succumb to lazy thinking about racial categories.

Large scale immigration isn’t popular with anybody except for libertarians and billionaires.

I guess this is true, but I’d like to see some numbers on this. My sense (which could be wrong) is that white people in areas that have been heavily demographically affected by immigration don’t have much of a problem with it. But people from areas where immigration has had little to no impact visit immigrant-heavy areas or observe them on TV, don’t like what they see, and clamor for reduced immigration (or moratorium.)

Suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged 20-34 years; it’s guilt.

No, that’s completely wrong. Shame is a much bigger reason for people to commit suicide. Guilt, on the other hand, would impel a person to make amends or do penance, neither of which will happen if he/she is dead.

importing Africans to live among white men– an epic betrayal of their own race

The original white settlers–the Puritans, Virginians, Carolinians– chose to leave the company of white men to live in a country full of red men. Was that also an epic betrayal of their race? Should they just have stayed in Europe and not ventured out?

If Columbus should be honored for the reasons you give, then he should be honored by everyone, for those same reasons.

Your comments are sensible, but are likely to fall on deaf ears on this blog. People on this forum consider race loyalty to be the highest virtue, far above universal morality (which many here don’t seem to subscribe to.)

To put it bluntly, because of the extreme competition for resources that existed in virtually all European nations in past centuries, and the attendant difficulty in raising a family, it is safe to say that the vast, vast majority of Americans of European ancestry living today would never ever have come forth into existence if not for Columbus and his priority in the story of America.

That’s exactly the situation that exists today in much of Asia and Latin America. You just made the case for large scale emigration from those places to relatively more resource abundant places like North America.

Ebola Sultan?

Mass immigration of low IQ individuals helps the elites stay elite.

Zuckerberg wants low IQ individuals staffing Facebook?

The bad thing about a lot of bible thumping Republicans like Mike Huckabee is that they believe making sure people of the same sex can not marry each other is a million times more important than keeping America a predominantly White nation.

Why exactly is this surprising to you? Huckabee’s discomfort/opposition to gay marriage comes from the same core motivation that your wanting to keep America white comes from: the fear of your culture and society changing in ways that make your daily life tough or unpleasant. The difference between you and Huckabee is that you can’t get past skin color; probably the sight of non-white people in America fills you with a sense of deep foreboding, whereas he can get past skin color and look at how people behave instead; it’s just that the sight of gays showing affection to each other in public probably nauseates him.

If you can trivialize Huckabee’s discomfort, that ought to at least make you reflect on your own feelings towards non-whites, and on the whole immigration issue.

with or without white racists.

Only if you are comparing these countries in the colonial state to the post-colonial state. Economic historians agree that China and India were the #1 and #2 economies in the world until the mid-18th century. Now these were hardly egalitarian and progressive countries back then, but at least the wealth stayed local and didn’t drain away to places on the other side of the world.

The conquests of the British East India Company devastated the local economies of India. Economic destruction and the consequent evils (like famine) EXACTLY follow the trails of British conquests across the subcontinent. Now, once the British became the paramount power, they did try to do some good, like institute a rule of law (which was unfortunately DOA because white people in India were legally and practically above that law) and infrastructural projects (produced good results but also caused environmental destruction because the British thought the local communities were full of savages whose traditional knowledge could safely be ignored.) But it could not make up for the earlier economic destruction and loss of political freedom.

White men did take up a lot of burden. But, with very few exceptions, it was all for their personal benefit and not for the darker skinned people they ended up dominating. Don’t project the values of present day western liberals (which I agree are often self-flagellating) on to the white people of the 19th century.

And only someone pretty unfamiliar with India could fail to recognize just how much change has swept through Indian religion and culture. I practice a religion and live in a culture as close if not closer to that of my ancestors did in 1750s North America as an Indian in New Delhi does to his.

I don’t know what this has to do with the topic of the blog post, but modern New Delhi is to Hinduism as Sodom was to the practitioners of the Abrahamic faith. If you step outside the big cities, people practice a religion and culture that is a lot older than the 1750s (some practices date back to the BCs, and most to the 1st millenium AD, even though there have been a lot of revivalist movements since the late 19th century.) Whether those cultural and religious practices are good and ought to be retained is a different question; the caste system is definitely due for a demise, and has been heading that way for a century now, though progress has been slow.

Remember that the major expansion of the empire into India and Africa occurred in the second half of the 19th century under the leadership of Disraeli.

Africa, yes. India, no. You don’t seem to know anything about the history of India (or specifically British India.) Conquest in India started in the mid-18th century by the private East India Company, and was virtually complete by the early 19th. A revolt in 1857 was the last gasp of the old guard, but they were swept aside, the EEC disbanded, and the Crown formally incorporated India into the British Empire. That happened well before Disraeli got his hands on power. And while the Tories and the Liberals had their differences in the late 19th century, both sides were dominated by committed imperialists. William Gladstone was in no way “reluctant to expand the empire”. He probably did care for more human treatment of the natives and more legal protection of their rights though. You are probably thinking of Ireland, but that is the only example of Liberals and Tories differing fundamentally on imperial policy and should be treated as an exception (which it was, being a white country.)

I guess when my son gets a bit older I should reread him the relevant part of ‘Our Island Story’, a children’s history of Britain from 1905 that does cover the various massacres of white women & children during the British rule of India. He’s certainly not going to hear about it in school.

He’s not going to hear about it because it didn’t happen. By the way, the relevant incident took place in Kanpur (British rendering: Cawnpore), not Lucknow. British women and children who had been granted safe refuge were found massacred at the bottom of a well by the British soldiers when they retook the city. The Indian soldiers furiously denied the deed, which was probably committed by enraged civilians who had lost relatives to British reprisals. This was the only incident of civilian massacres by the Indians, which though got embellished by the British, who made it seem as if such massacres were commonplace. And, by the way, leading up these massacres were the actions of the British soliders, particularly one of the Highland regiments, who traipsed around the countryside hanging people from trees; many of these people were innocent and unarmed (and children), their sin was not supporting the British and providing them with supplies. And after the battles were largely done and over with, the favorite means of revenge employed by the British was blowing off their prisoners from the mouths of cannons.

There was enough barbarity in 1857 on both sides to make one sick to the stomach. You should read Andrew Ward’s “Our Bones are Scattered” for a well-researched account of the events. There’s a good reason why British schoolkids are not taught much about their history in the subcontinent in the 19th century, especially 1857. It’d be a deeply shameful one.

Britain: 6 looms per worker (vs 8 in USA!)
India: 2 workers per loom (plus an overseer per 2 looms)
Giving rather less than 1/12 the productivity per capita.

You should check out this review of Clark’s book. Whether or not staffing is related to productivity is debatable. Jobs in less developed countries may often be sinecures. Plus the low wages make it economically feasible for employers to hire more people just to watch each others’ backs. It seems other studies indicate that the same workers who emigrate to developed countries end up working at the prevailing efficiency standards in their host countries.

including the Black Hole of Calcutta

My understanding is that this was more a sin of omission than commission. The rules of Bengal had EEC officials arrested, put in a rather small prison, and promptly forgot about them for a couple of days. In which time many prisoners died of heat and starvation. Regardless, I agree it was a barbaric thing to do. And the ruler dearly paid for it.

Of course the cultural Marxists would say that ‘we’ – in this case our young women – deserve to be abused, because of what ‘we’ did in other countries long ago, or perhaps even what ‘we’ did in eg Iraq quite recently. I would disagree with this argument.

So would I. Can’t someone garner sympathy for the victims (and conduct more prosecutions) by pointing out they were children? The children card seems to play very well in the US, and trump all other claims of victimhood.

All examples you cite are of people trying to protect cultures, not particular shades of skin color. Though I agree with you that what applies to goose should also apply to the gander. Leftist ideologies ascribe automatic virtue to minorities, and assume that majorities can withstand any amount of cultural stress (hence deserve no special protection.)

But more alarming to me are cases of children who arrived from Asia before puberty, but who still have an accent.

Why exactly is this? Are the schools in the Bay Area not doing their jobs? I assume you spoke at least some Bengali at home growing up, right? So the school’s got to be the major variable.

PS: Pic resembles a little Ramanujan. 🙂

If you encounter the enemy less frequently you can put more time into innovation.

Or, it could be exactly the opposite. It seems the Tasmanian aborigines even forgot how to make a fire (surprising, given that Tasmania is rather cool), let alone innovate beyond stone tools, after they were separated from the Australian mainlanders.

Perhaps the best way to solve the world’s poverty and general social problems really is a British Empire-style colonialism.

No, thanks! It’s been tried before, and it enriched no one other than the British themselves. A number (though by no means all) of social pathologies in the formerly colonized countries can be traced directly to the colonial era. The overbearing and often corrupt bureaucrats in much of the Third World have their direct predecessors in those “overseers”, as you put it.

Your comment is emblematic of why the discourse on these comment boards is so perverse. The whole immigration debate is purely between American conservatives and American liberals. It has nothing to do with the immigrants themselves, who have no standing in the debate. Leave them and their countries alone. People in other countries do not try to guilt-trip Americans into liberalizing immigration; it’s the American liberals who do. If you can win the debate and institute immigration laws of your choice, good for you. The flow of immigrations will stop (again, Mexico may be an exception.) In reality, it is quite difficult and expensive for anyone other than a Mexican to emigrate to the US.

After all, you can have a very dark skinned woman from India, doing the job at half the wage in HR as Shaniqua.

HR jobs are going to H1B workers? I’m dubious.

Even Slashdot, home of clueless beta male nerds hopelessly PC bound, is increasingly hostile to H1-Bs

Slashdot has always been hostile to H1Bs. Before even Lou Dobbs was. Nothing new there. They ARE PC about illegal immigrants though, because Mexican gardeners don’t compete in the job market with them.

Thanks, I stand corrected (assuming that the account of fire-lighting techniques you cite is authentic.) I did some more reading, and it seems there’s a debate among ethnographers on this issue. I wasn’t trying to spread misinformation.

In any case, it seems the Tasmanians’ tools were more primitive than that of the mainlanders’. Which means that the cool climate did not really spur an innovative drive. Possibly due to the small number of humans and the virtual absence of human predators on the island?

But, it’s also indicative of the new diverse America, which is more driven by fashion and conformism, and is less individualistic and less contrarian. If everybody on Facebook is buzzing about a hiking trail that is suddenly being mobbed, well, Diverse-Americans want to go join the mob.

This is overly cynical. The vicinity is dominated by recent immigrants (and students), who come from crowded countries, and probably have never seen open spaces and pristine environment before. The first time they go hiking, they’ll probably do so because of social pressure, but then many of them fall in love with nature and make it a habit. Most American kids are probably dragged unwillingly by their environment-loving Dads (like yours) the first time they go hiking or camping too. It has nothing to do with Diversity or Vibrancy.

White people consider sex with children to be a moral abomination, and they crack down hard on violators. Non-whites don’t.

Forget to take your schizophrenic meds today, pal?

That does make me a populist, I suppose, but it’s hard for me to believe that most readers here would dogmatically stick to an economic policy to the detriment of their true community.

Belief in a “true community” is as much a dogmatic ideology as belief in a particular economic theory. There is no true or false community. Communities are created, reformed, destroyed, and re-created all the time. Communities exist to serve the individuals that form its constituent parts.

I thought all this “volk” business had fallen out of favor after the Nazis. I guess I was wrong.

By extending our moral community to the entire world, we’ve signed our death warrant. That kind of system isn’t sustainable.

You need to justify this. Why cannot good morals spread indefinitely by pulling in what you call “empathetic” people into the circle, and making membership of that circle something to aspire to? It seems to me that Westernization (as defined by consumerism, Hollywood, fast food, etc.) since the end of WWII, and especially since the end of the Cold War, has spread through much of the world already through this mechanism.

(By the way, my question is inspired by my skepticism of your theory that the ability for what you call “affective empathy” is hardwired in some human beings and not in others. I will believe it the day geneticists can produce a gene, or combination of genes, that infallibly determine who is empathetic and who is not. Until then, I’ll attribute societal empathy differences entirely to culture.)

I’m not saying that everything is biologically determined. I’ll hope you’ll return the favor by conceding that not everything is culturally determined.

If, by “everything”, you mean behavioral and cognitive characteristics, I do believe that there are differences among individuals that seem to be heritable. So, yes, I’ll concede your point. But the current state of evidence does not convince me that such differences in characteristics can be clearly mapped to racial groupings. I believe that the there is significant variability within races. The distribution functions (bell curves) overlap to large extents, except for the tails. I believe the non-overlap (or displacement) of tails is due to culture.

Why should cultural determinism be the default explanation?

It seems to be the most parsimonious explanation (to me at least). Within “culture”, I include historical experiences (e.g., persistent invasions can really mess up peoples’ psyches; empathy could go for a toss; yet no significant genetic mutations take place), social and political institutions, and religion. Move individuals (not large groups, mind you) from one culture to another; they seem to adapt to the norms of the host society.

We know that affective empathy is 68% heritable. In other words, 68% of the variability you see around you is genetic, not cultural. We also know that affective empathy is a specific mental response. It’s not a side-effect of something more general.

Peter, you are the expert and I’ll defer to your knowledge of the research in this field. Now, I may have a bias when I try to evaluate these results, as my background is in a scientific discipline where precision is not just valued, it is demanded. So figures like 32% seems rather large to me, and my brain immediately tries to list all possible variables that may not have been controlled and eliminated (like culture, history, etc.) This is a problem (or bias, or prejudice) I have with all social science (including economics), where theories are framed by correlating aggregate population characteristics with aggregate results. As Hayek said, one should always be wary of science turning into scientism. So my skeptical radar is turned on when I read articles on these topics.

Now, with genes, we have something approaching natural science, whereby we can model human beings through their basic building blocks, which seem to have predictable behavior. So if and when conclusive genetic evidence emerges for the theories you outline (i.e., medical tests on large representative sets of people, not questionnaires), I will believe it.