This NYT article is noteworthy in that it doesn’t bother to argue that Indian alcoholism is a socially constructed myth.

The liquor store owners (and, more to the point, their lawyer) really are rubes if they haven’t figured out the best way to fight any attempted crackdown is to accuse the state in trafficking in racist, colonialist myths.

Related: “As Obesity Rises, Remote Pacific Islands Plan to Abandon Junk Food,” New York Times, Feb. 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/world/asia/junk-food-ban-vanuatu.htm

Not sure how serious this comment is but that’s a silly thing to say. Even the most delusional shitlib would respond “We are not making any claims about the Lakota as a race, only that many individual Lakota have a disease that could be more easily treated by closing these stores.”

Research shows that alcohol use and alcohol-related problems are influenced by individual variations in alcohol metabolism, or the way in which alcohol is broken down and eliminated by the body. Alcohol metabolism is controlled by genetic factors, such as variations in the enzymes that break down alcohol; and environmental factors, such as the amount of alcohol an individual consumes and his or her overall nutrition. Differences in alcohol metabolism may put some people at greater risk for alcohol problems, whereas others may be at least somewhat protected from alcohol’s harmful effects.

https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/AA72/AA72.htm

In the 1970s in the military, I was stationed for a year at a radar site in Canada next to an Inuit (a.k.a. Eskimo) village. Inuit lived and worked at the radar site for snow removal and other chores. They had access to the lounge for the site’s Canadian “gringo” employees. A large number of the Canadian “gringos” were functioning alcoholics (what do you do at an isolated radar site on a mountaintop in the Arctic except drink?). However, when the Inuit started drinking, they could not quit. At some point, they frequently engaged in some kind of violent, self-destructive behavior such as smashing everything in their sleeping rooms including their prized stereo systems.

I also had a chance to visit a neighboring Inuit village up the coast. The Inuit council was in the process of banning alcohol from the village. Alcohol was having an unacceptable impact on the village and its Inuit inhabitants.

In my military travels, I later ran into German officers who could sit on bar stools and drink for hours without noticeable effect. In the field with the Germans, I also once had the experience of “beer call” in their tents. Propped up against the bunks in the tents while we drank were their automatic weapons and ammunition. No issues … no problems.

The difference? Like their lactose tolerance, Europeans appear to have an enzyme in their stomach that allow them to process alcohol. The Inuit and other Asians do not have this enzyme.

One more checkmark for biodiversity.

https://lordsofthedrinks.com/2013/06/24/why-indians-are-alcoholics-and-asians-cant-drink/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction

Maori have the same problem to a lesser degree. Their ancestors had never come across alcohol either. Europeans who didn’t drink in the iron age got dissentry and didn’t have descendants.

http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/maori-smoking-alcohol-and-drugs-tupeka-waipiro-me-te-tarukino/page-2

We also have the typical ineffectual PC handwringing.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/faces-of-innocents/82586709/Faces-of-Innocents-High-rates-of-child-abuse-among-Maori-can-be-traced-back-to-colonisation-academic-says

Maori would now have access to alcohol and junk food even if Europeans had never colonised the place. Do they really want to live like their ancestors did in 1600 with rampant tribal war and cannibalism? I would not want to be a medieval English peasant tied to a miserable strip of land by the feudal system.

From what I remember, one of the evolved defenses against alcoholism is that the human body becomes *worse* at metabolizing alcohol, leading to increased nausea and worse hangovers. So it might be interesting to experience alcohol as a Native American Indian.

So they ban research on genetic basis for addiction, and then say absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

The scientific literature has refuted the claims to many of these myths by documenting the wide variability of alcohol problems across and within Native tribes and the very different response that certain individuals have to alcohol opposed to others.

In order to test whether Native Americas have significantly increased rates of alcoholism relative to other races, the author points to scientific literature that compared subsets of Native Americans? The author then invokes anecdotes to bolster the purely statistical claim he just failed to support. How does stuff this trivially flawed make it through Wikipedia’s editing process?

I was under the impression that the genetic link was well-established as well as the connection with alcoholism in northern Mongolia and Siberia.

When I visited the Tsaatan reindeer herders, the Mongolian jeep driver who brought us had his jeep loaded with vodka and candy. The Tsaatan make some cash from making “traditional” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) reindeer antler carvings and selling them to the few tourists who visit them. They spent all their cash on vodka and candy. They drank up the vodka immediately, getting plastered, and the children ran off with the candy. Predictably, their health problems include high blood pressure and rotted teeth.

BTW, they need the cash to buy bullets to hunt game.

Also, we heard about a Russian doctor who was supposedly putting “chips” in people to cure alcoholism. We met one supposed patient but couldn’t get much info. I’m assuming it was some subQ Antabuse or Campral.

WHITECLAY, Neb. is a mirror image of present day San Francisco. Hopefully the indians do not defecate in public

https://willyem.carto.com/viz/156b1e0c-5b45-11e5-9351-0e018d66dc29/public_map

Thanks for the reference to the NYTimes article.

You dropped the final letter of the link. It should readjunk-food-ban-vanuatu.html

I have spent extensive time in the Andean highlands, where much of the population is descended 80-100% from Incan and Canari people. I have seen no more alcoholism or drinking than an average white town in the U.S.

In fact–and this is OT, but deals with the HBD issues so often discussed–the millions of Andean people don’t seem particularly ill suited for modern civilization. They are neat and tidy, not particularly law breaking, and fairly hard working. The big issue is that they seem clustered around a very average intelligence. The smarter ones seem to have an IQ of 110, max, and anyone who works as an engineer, doctor, or the like has obvious European blood in them.

Ecuador and Peru would benefit from a couple of million Chinese immigrants, and China wouldn’t miss them, either.

If I am not mistaken, the cause of alcoholism has something to do with the way some bodies metabolize sugars. Non-alcoholics get ferocious headaches if they drink too much (it becomes poison), alcoholics don’t. I forget the exact chemical explanation but it is well-established and it is certainly genetic in origin.

From the late, great George MacDonald Fraser:

I first came across this in the United States, where the cancer has gone much deeper. As a screenwriter [at which Fraser was almost as successful as he was with the 12 Flashman novels; his best-known work was scripting the Three Musketeers films] I once put forward a script for a film called The Lone Ranger, in which I used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen and was as spectacular as it was shocking – and true.

The whisky traders of the American plains used to build little stockades, from which they passed out their ghastly rot-gut liquor through a small hatch to the Indians, who paid by shoving furs back though the hatch.

The result was that frenzied, drunken Indians who had run out of furs were besieging the stockade, while the traders sat snug inside and did not emerge until the Indians had either gone away or passed out.

Political correctness stormed onto the scene, red in tooth and claw. The word came down from on high that the scene would offend “Native Americans”.

Their ancestors may have got pieeyed on moonshine but they didn’t want to know it, and it must not be shown on screen. Damn history. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen because we don’t like the look of it.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn’t present the picture they would like.

The last testament of Flashman’s creator: How Britain has destroyed itself

Here is a scholarly article on the genetics of alcoholism among American Indians: https://goo.gl/CRKdDP

Abstract:

Enzymes encoded by two gene families, alcohol
dehydrogenase (ADH) and aldehyde dehydrogenase
(ALDH), mediate alcohol metabolism in humans. Allelic
variants have been identified that alter metabolic rates and
influence risk for alcoholism. Specifically, ADH1B*47His
(previously ADH2-2) and ALDH2-2 have been shown to
confer protection against alcoholism, presumably through
accumulation of acetaldehyde in the blood and a resultant
‘flushing response’ to alcohol consumption. In the current
study, variants at ADH1B(previously ADH2), ADH1C (previously
ADH3), and ALDH2 were assayed in DNA extracts
from participants belonging to a Southwest American
Indian tribe (n=490) with a high prevalence of alcoholism.
Each subject underwent a clinical interview for
diagnosis of alcohol dependence, as well as evaluation of
intermediate phenotypes such as binge drinking and flushing
response to alcohol consumption. Detailed haplotypes
were constructed and tested against alcohol dependence
and related intermediate phenotypes using both association
and linkage analysis. ADH and ALDH variants were
also assayed in three Asian and one African population (no
clinical data) in order to provide an evolutionary context for
the haplotype data. Both linkage and association analysis
identified several ADH1C alleles and a neighboring microsatellite
marker that affected risk of alcohol dependence
and were also related to binge drinking. These data
strengthen the support for ADH as a candidate locus for
alcohol dependence and suggest further productive study.

It has been oft stated that Mediterranean peoples, such as the Greeks and Italians, have more tolerance to alcohol than Northern Europeans. I’ve often wondered why Northern Europeans develop civilization so much later than the Mediterranean peoples. Part of it is obviously the harsher climate and shorter growing season that delayed the arrival of agriculture. But before they ever had agriculture themselves, they still would have contacted and traded with the Mediterraneans. This would have been their first exposure to alcohol and it would not have gone well. This may the reason why the Germanic peoples didn’t fully arrive on the stage of History until the early 1st millennium AD. It simply took them that long to develop enough resistance to alcohol so that it didn’t hinder the growth of civilization.

I believe in genetics, and they probably do have a genetic propensity toward alcoholism. In this case, however, I believe it is a secondary issue.

The problems of the American Indian are not that different from the “white death” and heroin problems among white Americans today. A family of four native Americans receives over $80,000 a year in cash from the government. They often have a home bought for them as well. I assume they qualify for other welfare benefits on top of all that. Reservations are cheap shitholes, and it doesn’t cost anywhere near that to get by on one. So they are idle, and swimming with cash.

But it’s not just that. They have no reason to live. Nobody needs them, their culture is destroyed. Cultural transmission to the next generation is not only unmovitating, it’s impossible.

It is a rare breed of human that is content to be a consuming wage slave, with all organic culture practically outlawed, if not literally outlawed (hunting vs. poaching, gay wedding cakes, etc.)

Obama worked very hard to get as many people on the government teat as possible. He paid contractors a commission for signing poor people up for entitlements. It was pure evil. That’s where a lot of the “white death” comes from. We have lost our purpose, and it happened to the American Indians first. Addiction isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom. Treating addiction will therefore be futile. There is no quick fix. The American government would have to be dissolved completely to undo all the legal precedent that has destroyed both American white and Indian cultures.

There are reservations in Arizona which are so large and remote that alcohol is not that big of a factor, and they still look like Mad Max’s playground of burnt out cars and wild dogs roaming around.

At some point there was a federal court decision saying that laws prohibiting sales of liquor to Indians were unconstitutional. I can’ remember where. Googling did turn up a 1954 Idaho decision upholding such laws. The majority says: (https://casetext.com/case/state-v-rorvick)

“Consumption of intoxicating liquors never advanced or benefitted any race or any people, and history proves that it has cursed and demoralized the Indians.

There is no natural or inherent right to deal in intoxicants and the sale of beer as a business can only be lawfully done as authorized by express legislation. …”

” also within the province of the Legislature, regardless of citizenship, to specify classes and persons to whom sales of intoxicants shall not be made. Statutes prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors to sailors and soldiers, and persons in the military service, Bailey v. United States, 6 Cir., 267 F. 559; to students, People v. Damm, 183 Mich. 554, 149 N.W. 1002; to minors, State v. Alvord, 46 Idaho 765, 271 P. 322; to Indians, 42 C.J.S., Indians, § 76, p. 791, and authorities cited supra, have been universally upheld as a proper regulation of the liquor traffic, and within the police power of the State.”

The dissent was emotional, and said,

“The justification for upholding the constitutionality of this statute thereby classing Indians with drunkards, insane persons, idiots, and minors is assertedly based on pronouncements in the following cases:”

For the current federal judge-made law to be consistent, it should have said that for Indian reservations to ban liquor sales was unconstitutional, since the Indians are clearly aiming their prohibition at Indians, blatant discrimination. The same would be true of suggestions like that in the original post that licenses should be taken away from towns near Indian reservations. I’d like to see the Supreme Court embarassed by having to deal with a lawsuit from the liquor store owners.

In addition to the 50-100 of drunk driving, it’s worth noting that the towns in South Dakota closests to Pine Ridge are small and draw a lot of tourists in the summer. They want no part of Pine Ridge residents coming there to buy booze.

Wonder if we could get an article from the NYT on how Indian tribes sell fireworks to folks who reside in states where they are banned, like California. Them damn things kill people every year and gives the Southern California Mexicans another way to terrorize the homeowners with a house getting burned to the ground.

some years back I was in Bolivia on a New Year’s day. Saw hundreds of Indians on the road
drunk. Never forgot that sight.
Seems to be the case in Japan, if one observes men on the subway/metro going home drunk.
I think that there must also be a deeper psychological reason, losing one’s lands to the White man must have been soul destroying.
Drinking as a form of suicide?

Native people in Australia are also well known to have a significant problem with alcohol.

It is related to Ethnic Differences in Drug Metabolism, another under studied issue:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6754206

Trying to shut down a legal product across state lines because Indians in another state can’t handle it is outrageous. If Indians in South Dakota got into a lot of car crashes, would Nebraska politicians try to shut down car dealerships near the state line? I doubt it.

This is just another in a long list of examples of how the white man is blamed for everything. If Indians can’t handle alcohol, they shouldn’t use it. If they want to outlaw it on their reservation that’s fine. If they insist on drinking anyway, it’s the white man’s fault for operating liquor stores?

And where do you draw the line? If liquor stores near the state line are shut down, won’t the Indians simply go further to get booze? Why not shut down all the liquor stores in Omaha, because an Indian might come in and buy some?

Racial politics always plays to the lowest common denominator. Minorities are never viewed as having any personal agency or responsibility. Whites are always regarded as the cause of their problems.

I suspect you have in mind In re Heff, subsequently overruled by United States v. Nice.

The cases were really about the federal legislature’s plenary power to regulate Indian affairs, more so than civil rights as such; despite the subsequent craze to deem all laws racist (whatever that means…) unless they harm white people, Nice remains good law, mostly because – why else? – it benefits Indians vis-à-vis cash and prizes.

Australian Aborigines (not Amerind), Siberian natives, Alaskan Eskimo (& Canadian Inuit because they don’t like Eskimo as a name) have a similar problem. Peruvians (genetically Amerind) don’t. The social situations of Aborigines and the various Amerinds are similar, so this is evidence for the social situation argument. But a genetic argument can’t be ruled out until tested. What made it such a sensitive issue? Kennewik man – he might have been European – or was it an issue earlier?

In a previous life, ages ago, I spent some time hitchhiking around the American Southwest Desert. This included a hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, solo nights in the middle of the frozen desert in December, and a lot of time with Navajos in the Four Corners area.

Lots of Navajos picked me up in their pickup trucks. Commonly, they would be drinking beer in the cab. They were friendly, and they offered me beers to drink while they drove. One time though, the old Indians who stopped where so stinking drunk that I got scared and balked at getting in. They then said things like “fuck you” and other slurred words I couldn’t understand. I didn’t accept the ride that time.

Drinking did indeed appear to be a problem there on the Navajo Reservation.

I will add that my overall experience was good. Lots of friendly Indians. Just a few who were driving around the desert drunk in their pickup trucks.

French and alchoholism

Alchoholism of the lower classes was a regular topic for Zola
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L’Assommoir

In the US prohibition was mostly for white people.

Maybe someday the genetic link to Indians will be proven.

Before the immigration act of 65, employers had to hunt down suitable employees. For example Mohawk iron workers.

http://www.sites.si.edu/exhibitions/exhibits/archived_exhibitions/booming/main.htm

According to New York City mythology the Mohowks lack fear of heights, but I suspect dad brought his teenage son to his first day of work and the kid got used to it. They were not known to be drunk. So maybe Pine Ridge sucks, and with 30 whatever million illegal aliens in the US they can’t easily leave, and ‘big city’ employers are not desperate enough to troll Pine Rdge for workers.

Pine Ridge indians should have the same genetics as South Americans.

It is a good thing that we recognize that American Indians have a particular problem with alcohol.

Similarly, African Americans have a particular problem with handguns. Some realities need to be faced.

I remember the Indian folk singer Buffy St. Marie in the late ’60s, early ’70s, acknowledging that Indians did not metabolize alcohol the same way whites do and that it was a tremendous problem for them. Then the time came that you were no longer allowed to talk about things like that.

I’m with the cops on this one. My best guess is that the Sioux would simply drive to the next town. I doubt that an extra ten or twenty minutes each way is going to stop alcoholics from getting liquor.

You might slow a few down a bit, but it would come at the cost of more traffic accidents and fatalities. Doesn’t seem worth it.

Btw, there’s not a doctor in that area that doesn’t think that genetics are mainly, if not wholely, responsible for the alcoholism rate among Indians. The Sioux drink unbelievable amounts of booze whether they’re on the reservation or not.

Indeed, the heart of the matter. Laws and a Constitution drawn up for K-selected Anglo-Europeans may not work out so well when applied to r-selected Africans and Indio-Americans.

One solution may be to allow hallucinogens like marijuana and psilocybin. Of course, wandering around all day in a mild psychotic state is not healthy either, and may lead to brain damage and schizophrenia over the long term (long-term use of hallucinogens seems to be another area where journalists and academics are strangely incurious). The reservations probably need to be bought out and the indigenous assimilate into the majority population to the extent they can. Of course, Central and South America remain racially stratified after the indigenous and Iberians have had over 400 years together.

What to do with the hunter-gatherers after the farmers show up and take over seems to be a perennial problem. In the old days, the farmers just massacred them.

Race does not exist. There is no science that shows that race exists (and we won’t let anyone do any science that says otherwise – such science would be pseudoscience anyway, so there’s no point in even trying – trust me, you’ll be sorry if you try).

However, when it suits our purposes, it exists plenty. See affirmative action. Race is like one of those guns that only fires for its owner who is wearing a magic ring. The left owns race. The race gun fires for it, but if anyone else tries to use the race gun, it won’t shoot for them. If they try to shoot it, then it backfires and tattoos a swastika on their forehead.

We the left own the Megaphone and set the rules for the racial dialog and these are the rules that we have set. We have also decided that only white people can be racist and only white people can be guilty of cultural appropriation. We can talk on the cell phone but you can’t wear hoop earrings, ’cause we say so. At least 1 of the 2 major political parties has built its entire existence on pandering to our POV. Good luck changing the rules, racists!

Native Americans seem to be stubbornly immune to becoming part of the Great Leftist Collective and screaming “racist!” at whitey at every opportunity. Hence here why there is open discussion in the NY Times about racially-based problems among them with no outcry or checking-over-your-shoulder-to-make-sure-its-ok-to-talk kind of writing.

For example, it was only a scant few years ago the Left suddenly got their panties in a wad about the Washington Redskins being a huge racist name that needed to be blighted from reality and given a firm damnatio memoriae.

Except a funny thing happened on the way to Winston Smithing the Redskins: native Americans didn’t agree. In polls of them, they firmly held that the name was not racist, and natives were actually kinda proud that the storied franchise had them as their face. In fact, one shocked Leftist reporter discovered that one reservation’s high school actually used the name “Redskin” as their own mascot. (Corvinus will lie and claim none of this happened and that Native Americans are “up in arms” about such racism in the NFL).

Back in the late 1960s the Left tried for a Native American movement to go along with their Black movement and Women movement, but outside of some environmental crap they got nowhere. Johnny Cash released a whole album decrying whites treatment of red men, and we got some revisionist Westerns (Dances With Wolves was a later edition) , but Native Americans didn’t start blowing things up or writing crazed manifestos and such.

The most angsty angry Leftist Native Americans are actually the fake Native Americans: Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren.

The people being Watsoned for mentioning unmentionable facts are overwhelmingly white. But the people getting screwed over are mostly blacks and Indians who have huge, hard-to-solve problems that nobody can afford to be seen thinking clearly about.

This fits uncomfortably well with Thomas Sowell’s contention that underperforming minorities are nothing more than mascots for a lot of social movements. If your mascot drinks himself to death or gets killed in a drive-by, you don’t shed any tears, you just get another mascot. Plenty more where they came from, after all.

I worked with dozens of Native Americans, members of the Seneca and Mohawk nations. They can climb on the iron but they can not hold their liquor, end of story. Often, when I was running a job, I would buy one, and only one, drink after work. Some of the braves would wobble after the first drink. There are four large reservations in WNY. You can buy reduced tax gas and tax free smokes, but no alcohol. But on a happy note for our native brethren. The Seneca Nation has announced that the casino pact that they signed with NY State had a contractural flaw that allows them to cease payments to the state. Since signing the pact in 2002, the Senecas have paid NY $1.5 billion. The indigenous people of the Americas also made their own home brew “beers”, but they had no native sociologist to research the effects of alcohol and no NYT to scream racism.

I confess that when I drank ( which is not much these days ) I drank for effect not socially. I wasn’t belligerent I just enjoyed being pleasantly drunk. OTOH, in my salad days, I tried the other fashionable intoxicants and could’t see why people smoked marijuana or liked meth and cocaine. If I was in pain, I would gladly accept codeine or even morphine if the doctors offered it but didn’t go looking for it afterwards. Thus I lean to there being a genetic component to the abuse of drugs.

Women, in particular, seem to like pharmaceutical pain killers and drugs like xanax and valium more than men and white men seem to be the primary abusers of meth amphetamine. We spend a lot of money on drug and alcohol rehabilitation and even more on law enforcement attempting to reduce drug abuse but very little on understanding why some people are more vulnerable than others to different drugs.

Keep in mind that the # of hunter-gatherers left (especially pure blooded ones) is minuscule anyway. N. America was always thinly populated but after the white people showed up the native American population collapsed, mainly due to epidemics rather than massacre.

Anyway, the Indians were not exactly hunter-gatherers. Especially before the Spanish brought horses that made it easier to chase buffalo, the Indians practiced agriculture. The Indians planted corn, beans and squash – they showed the Europeans how.

Corn, as we know, can be fermented into beer and, with a little technology, fire water. Distillation would have been too much to ask (the Europeans got it from the Arabs only a few hundred years before Columbus, although the Arabs used it only to make eye makeup (alcohol = al kohl)) but a corn mash will ferment into a low alcohol beer just from wild yeasts. S. American Indians made (and still make) maize beer that they call chicha. America also abounded in wild grapes (“Vinland”) which also could have been fermented. The Indians also knew how to tap maple trees – maple sap can be fermented into a sort of mead. So the lack of alcohol was not due to lack of suitable products to ferment. It’s possible that their agriculture was so marginal that they did not have calories to spare for “luxury” products such as maize beer (usually the spent grain is discarded or used as animal feed (but the Indians had neither chickens nor cows nor pigs), so there is a loss of calories vs. just eating the corn). Without metal tools, without draft animals, living in a forest, anything bigger than a little garden patch would have been a struggle.

Some of the braves would wobble after the first drink.

Indians are genetically Asian (I guess Asian selection for IQ occurred after the migration across the land bridge – as we can see from Ashkenazi Jews, IQ selection can take place over a short time span). Lots of Asians also lack the ability to metabolize alcohol and turn bright red after 1 drink.

Harry, please note for research on your comment: in Cincinnati last night 16 people were shot, one fatally in a nightclub shooting in the hood. Also, please note that a white driver in Cincinnati , who accidentally kid a 4 yr. boy who ran into the street, was shot and killed at the scene.

Jack D, interesting comment, but I have never met or even heard of an Asian Ironworker. Maybe it’s systematic racism.

If I am not mistaken, the cause of alcoholism has something to do with the way some bodies metabolize sugars. Non-alcoholics get ferocious headaches if they drink too much (it becomes poison), alcoholics don’t. I forget the exact chemical explanation but it is well-established and it is certainly genetic in origin.

Pure, absolute, face-palm inducing bunk. The cause of “alcoholism” is any kind of personal dysfunction that includes or involves the drinking of too much alcohol. There is no need to medicalize the dysfunction or to search for root causes in genetics or anything else. The very word “alcoholism” and its cognates ought to be abolished. There is no important difference between being a messed up person and being a messed up person who drinks.

Wikipedia articles at least discuss the prevalence of a genetic trait in Asian persons relating to tolerance for alcohol (or lack thereof), so this must not be (yet) something that cannot be spoken in polite society.

I knew a man whose parents were both from Mainland China who claimed that he avoided alcohol because he had that trait. Wikipedia claims this trait occurs in China, Korea, and Japan. I don’t have much experience with other East Asian societies, but my limited exposure to Japan suggests that drinking is part of the cultural fabric.

northern Indians are so vulnerable to alcohol

Their native Siberian cousins too.

“The reservations probably need to be bought out and the indigenous assimilate into the majority population to the extent they can.”

Trump should construct some Section Eight housing in Malibu and move them there. Sprinkled with a few Somalis for Diversity, of course.

Also, please note that a white driver in Cincinnati , who accidentally kid a 4 yr. boy who ran into the street, was shot and killed at the scene.

The driver was white and the kid black. Driver stopped his car and was attacked by a group of black men, who beat and then fatally shot him. If races were reversed, the name of the driver, Jamie Urton, would by now be universally known, with protests erupting across the nation. Instead only local media is reporting on the story and even then there`s no mention of the race of the victim or the attackers.

The child suffered only minor injuries.

Trust me, as someone who spent the first eighteen years of his life within spitting distance of the Concho Indian Reservation in El Reno, Oklahoma, whoever is telling the good Senator Patty Pansing Brooks “don’t bother” is telling it straight. The Cheyenne-Arapaho I grew up around – at one time I literally, not figuratively, had more American Indian friends than white friends because that was who was around to hang out with – were (and are) generous, witty, loyal in a “I got your back” sense to those they named as friends (myself included), and kind to a fault. The vast majority of them were also incorrigible drunks, even from their young teenage years.

On a side note, those that WEREN’T drunks or otherwise besotted with alcohol on a regular basis tended to be the best athletes in my junior high and High School, rivaling even the blacks in athletic prowess on the gridiron and basketball court.

On a second side note, doesn’t the name “Patty Pansing Brooks” sound perfectly WASPY do-gooder? I imagine if this was 1867 instead of 2017, Patty Pansing Brooks would be one of those fanatical abolitionist women who flooded into the South after the War Between the States with the intent of taking up the Plight of the Negro, and who then went on to champion the cause of Prohibition after that first project ran afoul of the grim realities on the ground in places with actual Negroes, instead of the fictional ones they’d gushed over while reading *Uncle Tom’s Cabin* for the fifteenth time.

But good luck, Senator! I wish you well in that endeavor, even as I can guarantee you with a certainty approaching 100% that it is an utterly futile one.

Back in dinosaur days when I lived in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, long before I became smart, sober, and hostile, I spent plenty of time drinking in some of the American Indian bars. It was evident that most of the Indians could not tolerate alcohol, overindulging without regard to consequences.

Growing up, I saw the alcohol problems a childhood friend’s family had. His parents were Menominee from Wisconsin. He lived with his mother and an Anglo step-dad. His mother and sister had horrible problems with drink while the step-dad did not.

But I do not believe it’s the government’s business telling adults whether or not they can imbibe.

Wikipedia’s express purpose is to summarise information from élite sources, such as academic research, in encyclopedia form. A Wikipedia article will unavoidably be bad if the academic research is bad (see: White pride). For articles on race, we’re stuck with the stuff and nonsense of academic social science, but the goal should be to force the inclusion of facts from hard science, i.e. biology and genetics (I’m sure most Wikipedia editors are going to default more toward soft science material). The hard part there is the “squid ink” urge on the part of hard scientists, not wanting to come out and clearly contradict the verities of left-wing social science.

Some of the braves would wobble after the first drink.

People who get easily drunk are less likely to become alcoholics. The ones with strong heads like Irish or Russians are more at risk.

Just let the poor Indians drink. Geez, they’re adults, can’t people let other people do with their lives whatever they want to do? I’m sick and tired of all the do-gooders running around with too much time on their hands. An old lady with “silver streaks” in her hair can’t have a drink? Crazy.

Actually, it’s an interesting question – we know that out West the railroads were in large part built by Chinese coolie gangs :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_Americans#Transcontinental_railroad

but they did not seem to retain a foothold in construction and after the railroad building was over, those that did not return to China went mainly in the direction of self-employment – laundries, restaurants, groceries, curio shops, etc. The wiki says (surprise surprise) it was due to “racism” (the modern equivalent of evil spirits) but I imagine it was due to economics – owning your own business was more lucrative than working for someone else.

Last year I visited Spain and while Spain does not have a large Asian population, in every city that I visited there was a “China” (pronounce Cheena) every few blocks – this was a little Chinese owned corner store that was sort of a combination 7/11 and dollar store, selling cheap toys and housewares and cell phone chargers, etc. as well as ice cream and beer.

Did you catch the other recent HBD-themed NYT article on how selection pressures affected our nose shapes? As if smelling potential controversy, the article concludes by stressing that our genetic differences are very small, and things such as different nose shapes between continents are a rare exception to the norm of our overall sameness.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/science/ancestral-climates-may-have-shaped-your-nose.html?_r=0

“It’s also important to note that less than 15 percent of genetic variation in humans can be attributed to differences between people from different continents, Dr. Zaidi said. In actuality, the genes that differ because of geographic origin, such as those affecting skin color, hair texture and nose shape, are the rare exception, rather than the rule. “People are more similar than they are different. What this research does is offer people a view of why we’re different,” he said. “There’s an evolutionary history to it that, I think, kind of demystifies the concept of race.”

“It’s easier to study Canadian and Mexican Indians”

And Irish Indians…

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/03/12/drunkards-how-anti-irish-stereotype-began/SL1aTTvw18blEJZpWmYnjI/story.html

The Native Americans have imposed Prohibition on themselves, but Whiteclay, Nebraska is a town that mostly exists to sell beer to Indian alcoholics.

Now I don’t know whether extending Prohibition to Whiteclay would be a good idea — some local law enforcement officials worry that it would mean that Sioux would drunk drive further for alcohol, endangering other motorists. But I want to point out that it is a good thing that we recognize that American Indians have a particular problem with alcohol.

Whiteclay has a population of only a dozen or so. But here’s the logical or philosophical conundrum – Indian reservations in Nebraska and South Dakota have casinos, and many people (of all races) who visit from outside the reservation have gambling addictions. It’s pretty easy to see that shutting down a beer town to help one population with an addiction, but not shutting down casinos to help another addiction is pretty unilateral and hypocritical. You could say that Indian alcoholism is genetic, but who’s to say that gambling addictions aren’t?

I don’t hear much about Cincinnati, doesn’t seem to get much press, but it is a scary place. Had to attend a meeting there years ago. Chatted w the driver on the way to my downtown hotel. When we arrived, he said “Whatever you do while you are here, do not go more than 3-4 blocks down this street in that direction.” and he pointed down the street.

Being a stupid too-curious sort, I thought I would probe down the street and see what he was talking about. I got about 1.5 blocks, got a huge load of incredibly rich intel information, and did a 180. I think if had gone >4 blocks, I would have been lucky to escape absent my wallet and just a few bruises on my head. Scary stuff

The article says they are open to selling.

The scientific literature has refuted the claims to many of these myths by documenting the wide variability of alcohol problems across and within Native tribes and the very different response that certain individuals have to alcohol opposed to others.

It bothers me that so many people nowadays do not know the meaning of the word “refute”.

I’ve been to the Seneca casino. First time I’ve ever seen people that look like Native Americans. Nice to see they’re still a thing on the East Coast.

Closer to home in Southern MD, the people that call themselves Native Americans look like light skinned blacks. It’s quite disappointing.

The plains indians seem to have the greatest problem with alcohol, and they were the ones who practiced agriculure the least, if at all. They retained the hunter-gatherer ways of the original asian peoples who settled North America.

Was on a road trip through the Southwest in Sept. ’08 .Stopped to get gas in Gallup, New Mexico . As we pulled into the gas station all these people who I thought were Hispanic stopped and looked at my car . Something was different though and as I gassed up I realized this was a reservation gas station and they were American Indians . The main thing I remember was the quiet . Not even coldness from the Indians – just complete QUIET . Never been in a gas station like that before or since . The govt housing was dreary but the place didn’t seem all that dangerous .

I’m in the process of becoming a Catholic. My mother is Catholic and I attended Catholic school up to middle school. I was never baptized though, as I approach 40 I figure it’s time to make it official.

Today at our little group meeting the subject of social sin came up. It was explained that this is our collective sin as a society. The example the leader gave was racism. I countered with gay marriage & abortion & wondered how do Cathollics reconcile living in a secular society that permits these things. This didn’t go over well with the leader but the rest of the group became awakened. I don’t want to get into the details but it’s became immediately clear that for many people of faith not running afoul of the dominant mantra of the day & not causing waves is more important than sticking up for their views in public.

Do the liquor store owners have no shame? I realize that some fraction of a liquor store’s clientele are bound to be alcoholics. But when most all of them are, wouldn’t that give the proprietor pause to consider what he is doing for a living?

Maybe they rationalize it by telling themselves that they are just good libertarians.

Luke Lea ain’t only scientific scientist here:

AA’s (such a cozy abbreviation !) metabolism burns building blocks so fast, that it automatically converts all their guanin into gunanin

They have been saying for decades that alcoholism is genetic. Does that mean we aren’t all created equal?

I suspect there is a wide variation in susceptibility to alcoholism among Native Americans. For example, the Comanche (a people with Shoshonean roots in southeastern Wyoming), who thwarted Spanish, Mexican and Anglo ambitions on the Southern Plains for the better part of two centuries, were known to be teetotalers, even though their frequent raiding surely gave them access to alcohol. And certainly there’s no shortage of wild, fermentable fruit available on the southern plains. Although they adopted peyote ritual during the reservation era, I’ve never had the impression that they’ve been known for alcohol abuse. Any investigation would be complicated by their small numbers – less than 20,000 at the height of their culture, reduced to a few thousand by the end of the fronteir era – and their practice of fully adopting children stolen from northern Mexico. Furthermore for the past century, they’ve been unable to establish a reservation culture because the U.S. government always reclaimed land that had been set aside for them.

You approve of independent thought but you plan to become a Roman Catholic?

It takes all sorts.

Alcoholism is rampant in both sides of my family.

I’m part Cherokee and Choctaw on my mother’s side. Dunno if that has anything to do with it. My grandfather was a drunk old Kraut German machinist. His dad was a drunk old fish erman on the North Sea.

My other grandfather and my grandmother both died of tobacco/booze related ailments.

I live in the New Orleans area and after Katrina I downed a bottle of vodka or gin PER NIGHT…..a big bottle…..nasty times.

I have working class German, English and Irish roots and Indian blood so who knows where the hell it’s from.

I feel sorry for Natives. I picked up a blonde, half white Native American girl in Vegas once. She was from a Pacific NW tribe and had nice olive skin.

I’ve never felt like a bigger piece of shit in my life than after I seduced her.

She has been an alcoholic for over a decade & had just found religion when I met her. Her dad had died scarcely a yr before….

All that aside look at the failed war on drugs and the gangsters paradise in the 1920s where the mafia made trillions in inflation adjusted dollars pumping booze to ordinary people…..

Banning booze will sadly just make natives from this tribe go elsewhere to score beer. And/or will provide a lucrative smuggling opportunity to some smuggler.

I only drink once or twice a month now.

Anything else and I can’t function

Something that The Dude/Trump crossover would say:

“Man, maybe it’s all about DNA and DMV, but when hit by drunken driver- we all bleed Native American.”

We are doomed…

Assimilation should have been the goal from the beginning, but the folks in the seventeenth century didn’t know what we know.

Almost certainly not true. The physical ability to drink more than others does not an “alchoholic” make.

What were you doing out there in the winter? Just camping?

I’m from the deep south, I LOVE the SW nice and dry and warm…..

When did you do your hitchhiking? 70s?

Also, please note that a white driver in Cincinnati , who accidentally kid a 4 yr. boy who ran into the street, was shot and killed at the scene.

Sounds like capital murder. The kid’s father claims the driver was speeding and that he tried to stop the guy. The driver might simply have thought it was an attempted carjacking. The father said his son’s brain is bleeding. Bottom line is – if you hit anyone in a black area – drive to the nearest police station, or until you see a patrol car.

I think this is a situation that has deteriorated over time. Look at the Google Street View of Whiteclay, there used to be some homes and businesses there but now Main St. is unpaved and vacant. The business may not have been started with the intention of exclusively selling to alcoholics from the reservation. However, I don’t think most liquor store owners consider the moral implications of their business. It sounds like the primary reason he is considering selling is the publicity and pressure from the state.

The Andean Indians had their own form of traditional corn beer (chicha) even before European contact so they may be more culturally/genetically adapted to consuming alcohol without self-destructing. They also had a fairly sophisticated civilization with big cities made of stone, religious temples, etc, while in N. America the Indians never got far beyond the stone age tribesman/ tree bark hut level.

The Peruvians have (and don’t seem to resent) an immigrant sector that supplies a lot of their high IQ needs. One of their past presidents was of Japanese descent and their current president is of 100% European descent – his father was a German Jew and mother was Swiss French.

I appreciate your comment and the honest realism of it.

Alcoholism is rampant in both sides of my family.

Mine too, and I have no Indian in me as far as I know. Just typical 3/4 Northern European plus an apparently Ashkenazi grandfather from San Francisco.

I feel sorry for Natives. I picked up a blonde, half white Native American girl in Vegas once. She was from a Pacific NW tribe and had nice olive skin.

I’ve never felt like a bigger piece of shit in my life than after I seduced her.

Our lives include experiences that make us wiser later. Our experiences with women are part of that. They too have this to reflect back upon.

You seem to be strong: “I only drink once or twice a month now.”

Godspeed to you.

Some native Americans had booze before the whites ever showed up. Link:

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/native-americans-introduced-alcohol-europeans/

Pulque helped some American aboriginals develop an alcohol tolerance. But the agave plant is confined to hot, dry climates. Indians who grew corn were able to make a bit of corn beer from it, but Plains Indians tribes like the Lakota were not farmers. They didn’t have much in way of surplus plant material to brew alcohol from, so they didn’t have much of a chance to breed for alcohol tolerance.

I completely agree.

I recently had morphine administered to me for the first time in my life due to a terrible accident and subsequent surgery. All it did was render me unconscious, so I cannot see the recreational value in it or related drugs like heroine.

I was on oxycodone for a my first couple weeks recovering. I could remain alert and feel its effects, but they weren’t pleasant, except for their suppression of pain—I was muddle headed and foggy. The idea anyone would eat that stuff regularly and indefinitely for fun boggles my mind; I couldn’t get off it fast enough once my pain subsided sufficiently.

I confess to…ahem…inhaling in younger days and I quite enjoyed it, but I know others who swear it never did a thing for them. I likewise quit drinking alcohol in large part because I enjoyed it too much.

I also once tried cocaine at a party, and all it did was make me antsy and stay up all night talking too much – I might as well have just had three or four cups of coffee for less hassle and the same effect. Yet some keep at the stuff until their noses literally fall off.

I expect we all have such stories. Even those who professionally help addicts speak of one’s “drug of choice.” What with all the advances in genetic profiling to identify markers for everything from irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease to predilections for cancer, I am convinced this field is ripe for lifesaving advances by geneticists and physicians, and the idea that those advances may be being delayed because of dumb-assed taboos about race is outrageous. We have been able to more effectively diagnose and treat people with osteoporosis, sickle-cell anemia, and gastroesophageal reflux disease by learning and acknowledging these have genetic components which track race. Why should addictions be handled differently?

I worked at a liquor store one summer when I was a kid. It was not near an Indian reservation but Jersey shore blue collar town. Let me tell you that most of our customers were “regulars”. It’s a legal substance. If the customer is not intoxicated, it’s lawful to sell it to them. We tried making the stuff illegal and that didn’t really work either. At some point people have agency – grown ass men were picking up these cases of beer and presenting them to me at the register for payment. What they did with it after they left the store was not really my business. Maybe they had a lot of friends that they were sharing them with so they needed to buy more every couple of days. The saddest were the women who would buy pints of booze – you knew that they were hiding them from their family. It was, I admit, a little soul destroying but I only did it for a few months.

The now-defunct Spearhead did an excellent article explaining why Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is the best place in the USA for women to live, because women there earn $1.11 for every dollar men earn. (Stamford, Connecticut has the worst pay gap at $0.54, so stay away from that hellhole, ladies).

https://web.archive.org/web/20141016202949/http://www.the-spearhead.com/2013/03/30/most-gender-equal-place-in-america-pine-ridge-indian-reservation/

Indians don’t worry that much about driving drunk on reservations. There aren’t many cars driving along those roads, and in the evening, if you drive drunk and ram into another car, it’s likely the people in the other vehicle are drunk, too. Neither perpetrators nor victims are in a state to make a big deal out of it.

People are more similar than they are different

We are also 99% similar to chimpanzees.

The post-Vatican II church of the Novus Ordo is not Catholic in any way, shape, or form. You’re wasting your time. Either go full traddie or just stay home on Sunday morning and read old theology books.

Ending the reservation system is tempting, but wouldn’t it introduce yet another general underclass where we already have about three? In the 19th Century, one of the ideas of the reservation was that Indians were confined to it–jump the reservation and the Army was sent out to round up the Indians and send them back. What about reviving that idea, banning alcohol on the reservation, allowinging people to leave only a permit basis (the Amish has a system like this), but introducing a subsidized economy? Maybe light manufacturing–textiles, shoes, something else. Every male works, but every male earns a living wage. They can practice their tribal rites for the tourists and have a living history Indian village. Sure it’s subsidized but that’s got to cost less and result in less social disfunction than what we’re doing now.

American Indians are known to be not very talkative. It seems like talking is a big effort for them so they do it as little as possible and only when absolutely necessary. It’s not something that they enjoy doing just for the hell of it. The early European settlers took this as a sign that the Indians were morose and that may be true to some extent.

Alcoholism means something when it’s used interchangeably with “alcohol dependence”, which, to an approximation, it usually is. The latter has a specific medical meaning. Alcohol dependence is an important concept because of the implications regarding withdrawal beyond a certain level of physical dependence and likely patient course. So, in that sense, there is a large difference between a messed up person and a messed up person who drinks, say, more than 10 drinks per day, the latter being at imminent risk of serious medical complications should they suddenly stop imbibing.

I tend to agree with your points about the root causes, although clearly some populations and even individuals are more predisposed than others. Recognition of this does not constitute a pardon to the weak willed. However, once the drinker has passed the minimum number of daily drinks required for physical dependence to begin, the personal dysfunction becomes a medical problem with a predictable range of outcomes and both well established indications for and limitations of treatment.

Right. Just look at a map: the Pine Ridge reservation is 100 miles wide; there are a dozen or more Nebraska towns 10 miles south of the border along US 20.

Well, the Cheyenne-Arapaho sound like a much friendlier bunch than the Sioux. But agreed on the athletic ability. In particular, the Sioux are amazing long-distance runners. They’d swamp the college ranks in the field if they cared a wit about school and/or could keep sober.

The Sioux also used to love boxing, which was a useful skill in that community. There aren’t any blacks around the Sioux, but that would have been an interesting combination. My suspicion is that blacks would be stunned to find a group just as quick to start swinging as they are and would quickly learn to tone it down around the Sioux.

ONe more check mark for white priveldge!!!

What Whiteclay is to Indians, Evanston Wyoming is to Mormons over the border in Utah. The Greyhound station there had a most impressive inventory of porn. (This was before the Internet age.)

American Indian Movement?

In the summer of 2015 I took Amtraks “Sunset Limited” train from New Orleans to LA for a comic convention and video gamer expo and then took the same train back.

On the train back I went to the bottom floor of the observation car & started drinking overpriced Old Milwaukee beer with an older Mohawk Indian names Daryl.

He told me he was from Syracuse in upstate New York. He was a retired iron worker. He had a dark lens covering 1 eye because he went blind in that eye from a stroke.

We drank from El Paso across the West Texas desert til we hit San Antonio where he took a different train

He got a check from disability. He had been living in Tombstone Arizona (“boring, only 1 bar and everyone knows everyone”, as he put it) and had caught the train in Benson, Arizona and was on his way to Texarkana to go live with some women

He spent the night telling me about his female conquests, his 3some w some Syracuse university students in his younger days, his religious beliefs, his kids/family, iron mill work, and about Arizona and the time he drank some high end whiskey that cost $800/shot.

My conversations e him lasted about 5 hours and reminded me of that phrase Steve uses “The old, weird America….”

Do the liquor store owners have no shame? I realize that some fraction of a liquor store’s clientele are bound to be alcoholics.

Alcoholics are a huge source of profits for the liquor industry. Just as gambling addicts are for the “gaming” industry.

Casinos can’t survive on customers who visit once a year and spend $100.00, they need people there 24/7. The liquor industry (not just retail) needs people buying alcohol every day.

I agree – the main effect I get from opiates is constipation, which is not very enjoyable. There have been times when I have been prescribed them after surgery and the unused ones (most of the prescription) sit in my medicine cabinet until I throw them out. But there are apparently people with addictive traits – they smoke one cigarette or take one pill and they are instantly addicted and all they can think of is getting another hit from that moment forward. In addition to genetic research we need to do more work with drugs that block the receptors for these drugs without causing other side effects so that the drug becomes a take it or leave it thing for them as it is for you and me, instead of an insatiable craving.

As a person blessed with ancient (((Mediterranean))) genes for alcohol resistance, I feel I’m squandering a God-given gift living my low-alcohol life.

But seriously, I don’t get why differential capacity to metabolize alcohol would have much to do with the incidence of drunkenness. I mean, everybody will get drunk after a point, which point can be reached after not much vodka, whiskey, etc. So it seems what really matters is your will to say Enough. (Or, if you’re me, you never get drunk because you just don’t like the taste.)

“American Indians are known to be not very talkative.”

There is a rather interesting episode during 19th century when Norwegian Sami people tried to create a partly religiously inspired prohibition for themselves called The Kautokeino Rebellion. The Sami who were inspired by the Laestadian Protestant revivalist movement tried to stop Norwegian merchants selling alcohol to their kinsmen. There is also a Norwegian movie about this subject.

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

What movement?

Seriously, just because it has a name and is bandied about by the Left doesn’t mean squat. There was absolutely nothing done but some pop culture revisionism, unlike with Blacks and Women, whose movements bore a lot of fruit for their leaders, rotten though it was.

Which is ironic, because American Indians have way more a claim for some sort of reparations than blacks and women. Thankfully, from a justice point of view, their reservations and their federally-protected casinos seem to be enough.

“But it’s not just that. They have no reason to live. Nobody needs them, their culture is destroyed. Cultural transmission to the next generation is not only unmovitating, it’s impossible.”

And what has their culture become? I talked with one CA Indian kid (not sure of his tribe) who had left the reservation simply because there was nothing in his future to look forward to but smoking peyote. That was his culture, apparently. Being stoned constantly doesn’t turn out to be all that inspiring for a human life.

“In the US prohibition was mostly for white people.”

I thought prohibition was racist for allegedly harming the cultural expressions of the German and Irish immigrants. Or something.

Please explain what you mean.

One of my business school classmates is from Peru. If he had any European blood I’d be stunned he looked pure Indian. I don’t know much about his background but he once shared a pic of his home in Peru. The pic showed a home with a pool and a killer view of the Pacific. I’m assuming his family is pretty well off. He went into investment banking and married an American rubia.

He was quite smart so definitely above IQ of 110.

Yes, in a better world it would have said “dispute”. At least it didn’t say “debunked”.

It sounds like those “studies” followed the template used by those who claim there’s no such thing as race.

The South Koreans are the highest per capita consumers of alcohol. Chinese people also drink hard. Asians got the genes for alcohol tolerance as well.

well then can we please stop subsidizing it through welfare? I’m okay with people drinking, but I don’t want to have to pay for it. Same thing with other destructive behaviors. At some point we want to say “we don’t want to live around worthless drunks/stoners/meth heads.”

There’s an evolutionary history to it that, I think, kind of demystifies the concept of race.

What in Hell is mystifying about race? I’ve known since I was in elementary school that, e.g., black people are because more melanin protects against sunburn, and white people are because less permits more synthesis of Vitamin D. I honestly don’t even recall when I read or was told this stuff (probably sometime between fourth or sixth grade; I may have even surmised it on my own once I learned about Vitamin D in health classes and the incidence of sunlight at different latitudes in science classes!), just as I couldn’t say when or how I learned canines are pack animals and felines are not; it’s among those things one has “always” known because its so fundamental and obvious.

Is it really so bad among the willfully stupid that acknowledging racial differences to be the result of evolution is some kind of breakthrough to them and that without the revelation (apparently requiring a detailed explanation from a scientist even to grown-ass men!) these differences were previously “mystifying,” like pathogens before microscopy?’

So odd that these are just ignored now. If evolution and biology don’t support the correct ideology then out the window they go.

My son spent 3 summers in the arctic doing research (on birds). He said the Inuit are all smoking pot now, though no doubt some of them are still drinking. The highest murder rate in Canada in in the Arctic, because the majority of the population is First Nations.

The towns with the highest murder and crime rates further south are also the towns with the highest portion of First Nations. (places such as Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Prince George –the natives in the east seem to have mostly died off). But they mostly just kill each other. Occasionally you will see an article in a newspaper about the high rate at which Natives are incarcerated. This is always attributed to a racist judicial system.

If anyone is rude enough to mention that the Natives seem to have a problem with drugs and alcohol, this is immediately attributed to their grandparents being in residential schools. In fact the residential schools were created because kids on reserves were neglected and abused by their drunk parents. It was thought if you could get the kids away from the drunk parents, the kids would turn out better. I’m fairly certain that the people who started those schools were the social justice worriers of their day. It would have been a lot easier and cheaper to simply leave the Indians to their own devices. And of course the residential schools were a terrible idea and certainly didn’t help with alcoholism!

Please stop sending Mexicans to Canada! We are all stocked up on drunk indigenous people!

You greatly underestimate the ratio for the person you’re replying to!

The Natives in most of Canada certainly weren’t farming. Even in southern climes they wouldn’t have been producing alcohol in industrial quantities.

Haha, sounds like a great scene, but not really one that ever would have belonged in a Lone Ranger movie.

It’s a pity about Wikipedia – fine for any uncontentious stuff, poison where PC pieties are involved.

The liquor store owners (and, more to the point, their lawyer) really are rubes if they haven’t figured out the best way to fight any attempted crackdown is to accuse the state in trafficking in racist, colonialist myths.

Minnesota will allow Sunday sales for the first time in generations starting this summer. The two Somalis who vied for Phyllis Kahn’s seat, one of which won it, both agreed with her that such sales should be allowed, despite having no intention of taking advantage of them themselves.

Is this evidence of a conspiracy to weaken the white man by introducing something he can’t handle?

Incidentally, a liquor merchant with the suspiciously spelled name of Surdyk is daring the state by starting his Sunday sales immediately.

Oh, and the state’s capital city was originally named Pig’s Eye, after a frog who dealt drink to the local Indians. The US Army put an end to that.

Even the most delusional shitlib would respond “We are not making any claims about the Lakota as a race, only that many individual Lakota have a disease that could be more easily treated by closing these stores.”

State Senator Patty Pansing Brooks, from the article:

“We are selling alcohol to a people who we have known for centuries are particularly vulnerable to alcoholism. We have been living off and getting tax receipts from their hopeless, vulnerable situation.”

The recent federal court cases over Trump’s refugee executive orders shows how politician’s extrinsic statements can find their way into court cases.

The article says they are open to selling.

I bet they are. $6 million (according to the article) for four roadside liquor stores in a town of 14 people in South Dakota is a heck of a windfall.

It’s a pity about Wikipedia – fine for any uncontentious stuff, poison where PC pieties are involved

Kinda like the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, etc, which are highly suspicious for the top prizes, but more trustworthy for the obscurer categories about which only the participants and aficionados care a whit.

Would really like to read the full “testament” ( have been a hopeless Flashman addict all these years ) , but clicking the link that you thoughtfully provided results in about a one half millisecond view.
Any alternative way of viewing the article ?

The way to fix it is focus on the related NW Euro problem with alcohol as the media is fine with saying negative stuff about Eurowhites – practically craves it.

Once shown for NW Euros the Aborigines, Amerindians etc will follow naturally.

Makes me wonder if you could CRISPR them with the East Asian alcohol genes?

The scientific literature has refuted the claims to many of these myths by documenting the wide variability of alcohol problems across and within Native tribes and the very different response that certain individuals have to alcohol opposed to others.

If its grain adaptation then the most grain growing tribes should have less problems than the least grain growing tribes (same as southern Euros have less of a problem than northern Euros).

I’ve seen alcoholism and drug addiction throughout my family. Also have predominantly German and mixed British Isles ancestry.

The alcoholism pops up here and there in my family, and seems to be either somewhat random or related to life circumstances (career and family pressures). It seems somewhat endemic, like it can get anyone. People tend to “scare” off it though after a few bad jags (e.g., a DUI or some other legal trouble) and either lay off or go into rehab, etc. I have a sense that there are different patterns of drinking behavior or reactions to drinking that affect the “prognosis,” as it were. Some problem drinkers, for whatever reason, will tend to go overboard into acute, heavy binge drinking in short bursts and will have serious consequences (social, legal, or physical) that might force them to change. Others will “handle their liquor” better over a longer period of time, but might wind up with worse long-term consequences as a result, as they quietly drink themselves to death.

I wonder whether other drugs (e.g., opioids, stimulants) might have similar variances by ethnicity or race in causing trouble, or if they basically just have pretty much equal opportunity potential to cause havoc. The “White Death” with opioids among whites makes me wonder, and I’ve seen up close and personal some pretty bad experiences white people have had with meth. Of course, when white people get threatened by addictive chemicals, they often have the means to fight (if perhaps not to win) wars against the dealers.

If everyone would be willing to confine their use of the term “alcoholic” to those who have a dangerous physical dependence on alcohol, then I suppose that would be alright (although I think, even in this case, a more explanatory term like “alcohol addict” would be even better); however, that is manifestly not how the word is used most of the time and it is not how it’s being used here in this thread. Most people use “alcoholic” to mean anybody with destructive, annoying, or excessive drinking habits. The notion of physical dependence doesn’t enter into the word’s vernacular definition, and it pertains to very small percentage of problematic drinkers in any case.

There is a huge amount of misinformation—in the form of cliches and euphemisms—circulating around in this world on the subject of drunkenness, and these verbal combinations really do hinder people from thinking and acting rationally with regard to said subject.

For example, how many times have you heard it said, usually by someone who’s had the longsuffering experience of dealing with a drunk family member, that “you cannot argue with him (her, someone, “a person”) when they’re drunk”?

This statement is not technically correct. You certainly can argue with someone when they’re drunk, and can even do so successfully. I suppose as an heuristic applied to certain concrete cases it can be fairly accurate, but it is worded in such a way as to completely distort the reality of the situation. The fact of the matter is that it is difficult to persuade anybody to do or to not do something when their passions are strongly disposed some other way. Many people under the influence of alcohol give themselves over to passion, but when confronting a recalcitrant drunk person it is still passion you’re dealing with, not “alcohol.” The difference is significant, as adopting the heuristic view leads directly to that other well-known cliche, “so-and-so is really a good person when they’re sober.”

This is more nonsense. Anyone with undisciplined passions, anyone who habitually acts out his inner turmoil under the influence of a few drinks, is by definition not a good person, and their momentary state of intoxication has nothing to do with it. What they really need to do is address their psychological and behavioral issues. When they do not look at and honestly evaluate themselves, and instead attribute their problems to drunkenness, they are removing agency from themselves and placing it on the alcohol. With this view in my mind, they would logically conclude that the answer to their problems is simply to stop drinking. True, they do need to stop drinking, at least for a while; but that alone isn’t going to help them become better people.

There is a vast, lucrative, and mendacious legal and medical fraud afoot to convince people that chemical substances can be the cause or cure of behavioral problems. This way of thinking leads to all kinds of socially harmful practices, from the medication of children for “ADHD” to the whole institutionalized insanity of drug rehab centers. It just has to stop.

How does stuff this trivially flawed make it through Wikipedia’s editing process?

Bullying by stupid SJWs who’ve been brain washed by media and academia – same as everywhere else.

I was under the impression that the genetic link was well-established as well as the connection with alcoholism in northern Mongolia and Siberia.

It should be a scientific argument but it’s not; it’s a political argument disguised as a scientific argument hence the way to approach it is politically.

The way to get around the PC hurdle is make the case by comparing NW Euros with southern Euros. The rest will then follow.

it’s not indigenous or not; it’s farmers vs herders vs hunter-gatherers

You wrote:

in N. America the Indians never got far beyond the stone age tribesman/ tree bark hut level.

I wouldn’t be too sure of that. The archaeological record of the mound-building Mississippian culture, centered on Cahokia in S. Illinois, argues that these tribes were fairly advanced, and seemingly poised to enter the Bronze Age when the climate recovered, but the arrival of the Europeans shattered their culture’s progress, and sent the survivors on the long road to Skid Row, reservation style.

Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture that developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1000 years before European contact.
[…]
Historian Daniel Richter notes that the apex of the city occurred during the Medieval Warming Period. This period appears to have fostered an agricultural revolution in upper North America, as the three-fold crops of maize, beans (legumes) and gourds (squash) were developed and adapted or bred to the temperate climates of the north from their origins in Meso-America. Richter also notes that Cahokia’s advanced development coincided with the development to the west of the Chaco Canyon society, which also produced large-scale works in an apparent socially stratified society. The decline of the city coincides with the little ice age, although by then the three-fold agriculture remained well-established throughout temperate North America.

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

As for drunken fools, I’ve known a few, none of whom were Indians.

farmer > herders > hunter gatherers

-> relative adaptation to grain sugars

White people are being affected by the Indians’ alcoholism. And to be fair, rural whites could probably stand to drink less too.

So it seems what really matters is your will to say Enough.

That’s genetic.

Lima has three or four gifted schools where most of the students are indigenous, excelling in chess, science, and math. Jorge Cori became a chess grandmaster at age 14. His sister is a woman grandmaster. Peru placed 16th at the 2015 International Mathematical Olympiad, winning two gold, two silver, and one bronze. Christian Omar Altamirano Modesto who won a total of four IMO medals is attending MIT on scholarship.

Photos of Peruvian 2015 IMO team and team leaders: LINK

The cause of “alcoholism” is any kind of personal dysfunction that includes or involves the drinking of too much alcohol.

It’s 100% certain that how different people metabolize sugar will be a factor in alcoholism in some as yet uncertain way (and maybe more than one way).

Being a screw-up will be another factor.

Reservation /rust-belt will be another.

(same goes for the obesity epidemic which is kind of a sugar alcoholism)

But South Korea is also home to more alcoholics than any other country, and alcohol-related social costs amount to more than $20bn a year, Ministry of Health and Welfare estimates show.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/02/country-world-worst-drink-problem-160202120308308.html

What you think you know and what the truth is is not always the same thing. One theory about white people is that it has nothing to do with Vitamin D but is rather the result of sexual selection – men prefer lighter skinned (more youthful looking) mates. Further south you could have this preference but then your offspring would burn to death before they could reproduce so the population never got lighter, but once humans moved north there was no brake on this process up to the point where extreme Nordics are almost albino because they don’t have to worry about dying of sunburn. You’ll notice that even before the era of Vitamin D supplementation, Africans and olive skinned races transplanted to New England or Europe did not drop like flies from Vitamin D deficiency but before modern migration there was a pretty even spectrum of coloration from inky black to pale based on how far north you were.

It started in 1978. I bought a one-way ticket from Denver to Flagstaff. The idea was to hike out into the desert and not look back. I was that unhappy, you see. I wasn’t just some privileged kid doing a bike tour across America. I was leaving behind my drunk parents who scared me.

So I met a lot of nice Americans of all kinds on the road. That continued until I finally decided to go to college. I was a high school dropout, so I took the requisite tests, GED and and then SAT: I scored in the 99% percentile, and got into a public Ivy university near my home that I could afford with in-state tuition.

As a person blessed with ancient (((Mediterranean))) genes for alcohol resistance, I feel I’m squandering a God-given gift living my low-alcohol life….So it seems what really matters is your will to say Enough. (Or, if you’re me, you never get drunk because you just don’t like the taste.)

Not liking the taste may be one of things selected for back in those distant days.

How are they at Scrabble?

Vast majority of RCIA in US are run by liberals. Best bet is to keep your head down, get through the process then seek out a more traditional parish- plenty of them still exist, esp. in urban areas.

This reminds me of the stuff about Great Zimbabwe. Color me unimpressed. The Europeans have Chartres cathedral and the Cahokia have a big mound of dirt that was abandoned even before the Europeans showed up.

They gave me some opioid the last time I was in the ER – pain was 8/10 with peritonitis – that took the pain right off and really felt good, like I could get addicted good.

The next hit didn’t do nearly as much, though it did dull the pain. Glad it didn’t.

Pretty snotty of you. I expected better from any commenter on this blog.

What’s mystifying, or frustrating rather, is the constant kid-glove coverage of basic evolutionary theory in MSM. It’s why I put that sentence in bold print.

No. You have no concept of what you think you are imagining. But I can’t blame you nobody who hasn’t lived through it can get it.

Sort of, but genes themselves are not static. Add in social/physical feedback dynamics. On top of that, belief in one’s capacity to change also affects that capacity.

Luckily, it looks like Ed will not be following your advice.

Full traddie isn’t bad, but staying home is how we got in this mess.

Ed, As I said I knew/know dozens of Senecas and Mohawks. They tend to marry in their tribe, with the occasional brave marrying a white women. I think because tribal rights are maternal they don’t want to lose benefits for their kids. Never knew any native women so I don’t know how frequently they marry out of the tribe.

Apparently aboriginal Americans are devoid of agency, just like the Left’s other client constituencies. In fact, the Left seems to believe that agency is inherent only to guns and Putin.

The article on nose shapes focuses on selection pressures due to climate, but it briefly touches upon “cultural preferences” also playing a role. Rarely can you find mainstream articles where aesthetics are implicated in evolution rather than just environmental concerns, so that’s something.

If you want to be part of the urban rainbow coalition you need to live an urban area.

Out of site out of mind.

Some years ago I remember reading that polls showed that American Indians were the most patriotic Americans.

As with most mutations selected for and preserved, light skin is beneificial for reproductive success and survival in more than one way, as your example demonstrates. The one cause does not nullify the others.

I expect no one in the history of the world has ever dropped like a fly for want of photosynthesised Vitamin D; the biochemistry of the thing simply does not work that way. I do expect the incidence of deficiency, to this very day, remains higher for Negoes in Montana than for Europeans in Florida, just as the incidence of sunburn and melanoma is the inverse.

“We have lost our purpose, and it happened to the American Indians first. Addiction isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom. Treating addiction will therefore be futile. ”

Bravo! Purpose or “identity” in the old-fashioned sense is the key. We in the West have lost it, and furthermore, are facing a resurging Islam, who after confronting their backwardness in the 19th-20th centuries, is now more self-confident in regard to the West.

When was it lost? Because Cultural Marxism is the symptom, not the cause.

We need more Catholics like you.

Speaking of Indians, SJWs or SLW’s(self-loathing whites) are like Indian scalp-hunters or New Guinea Head hunters.

They sure went for Murray’s head. And they got Spencer’s head too. They feel they must hunt for certain kinds of heads with ‘evil spirits’.

I think it has something to do with hunting instinct. I don’t think most people have individuality or agency when it comes to thinking about what is right or wrong. Rather, they belong to an ideology or culture controlled by OTHERS. They obey and accept the Narrative and then seek approval from the godhead(like the wizard of oz) by hunting for designated heads.
In this, their mindset isn’t different from that of dogs. Dogs get very excited in their hunts, but they don’t decide what is to be hunted. If the master says, ‘go hunt a pig’, dogs wildly go after pigs. If the masters say, ‘go hunt a fox’, dogs wildly go after fox. If the masters say, ‘go hunt a deer’, dogs are all crazy about hunting deer. Dog mentality seeks approval from the master or alpha leader, and dogs will go out of their way to bring down prey chosen by their masters. Only in the wild do dogs have agency in going after prey. As long as they part of human community, humans decide which animals are to be hunted and killed and which animals are to be spared and tolerated. So, if humans order dogs to hunt pigs, dogs will attack a pig. If humans order dogs to make nice with cats, dogs will make nice with cats. Anything for approval from the master. The frenzy of hunting dogs isn’t much different from the kind of frenzy we saw at Berkeley and Middlebury. They are like Red Guard Dogs. Universities ought to put up signs, ‘Beware of Dog’.
Cats are more independent, but even cats have a instinct that wishes for approval. Cats sometimes catch mice or bird and leave them on doorsteps. Some cat-specialists think that cats are trying to seek approval by offering food to their masters.

There are common patterns among animals, kids, and soldiers. Dogs will go after whatever pleases the master. Kids will ‘hunt’ for whatever is approved or sanctioned by adults. So, if adults say, ‘Go hunt for Easter Eggs’, kids will run around to find as many to show to adults for approval. If adults say, ‘lynch that pinata and spill out its guts’, kids will eagerly swing the bat to win approval. Soldiers are the same way. Soldiers never decide who is enemy or foe. When Hitler told Nazi soldiers, “Soviets are now our friends”, Nazi soldiers were shaking hands with Soviet troops. It’s like a dog will be nice with a cat if ordered by master to ‘be friends’. But if the master tells the dog to attack the cat, the dog will maul the cat to win approval. Likewise, when Hitler said, “Soviets are now our enemies and must be killed”, Nazi attack dogs went into attack-and-maul mode. And even in democracies, this is pretty much the case. US soldiers don’t decide who is enemy or foe. The elites tell soldiers, “those guys are the enemies”, and then, US troops will kill as many of the enemy to win medals and honors.

SJW-mentality is the same. Most of these guys and girls are nobodies. But they want to be somebody and win attention/affection, and that means they must hunt heads and win approval from the godhead. It’s like the Exterminators in ZARDOZ initially hunted down Brutals to serve the godhead.

That the SJW’s have no real agency is evident in their lack of consistency in principles. The Left used to be for free speech, now it’s not. It used to laugh at homos, but now homos are sacrosanct. Feminists used to denounce sex symbols and pornography but now embrace them. It used to not care about Muslims, but now Muslims are all the rage as ‘poor huddled masses’.
Most SJW’s have no minds of their own. They just follow the Narrative and will hunt heads to win approval from the godhead of PC that is controlled by the elites.

It’s like the guy who hunts for a head in UGETSU to win approval from the master class.

And there is head-hunting in Peckinpah’s movie too, though for a more mercenary reason, as in DAY OF THE JACKAL. Mercenaries hunt heads for money. Fanatics do it for approval from those who control the Narrative and terms of Justice.

In Nazi Germany, the villains were Jews, so the people, especially the impressionable young, were let loose on them. And Hitler Youth sure loved to blow the whistle on Jews to win approval. In Communist nations, the villains were ‘capitalist roaders’, ‘kulaks’, ‘bourgeois elements’, ‘reactionaries’, and ‘fascists’, so the over-zealous were on the lookout to nab one of these as trophy to win accolades and approval from Big Brother.

In the US, the godhead says KKK and Nazis are most evil. But who is a KKK or Nazi in today’s America? It’s hard to find such people. So, any white person who resists the full agenda of PC will suffice. So, Murray had to be head-hunted as a ‘nazi’.
Fanatics are more dangerous than mercenaries. Without money, mercenaries will not act. But fanatics, like dogs, will act out in violence and fury just for emotional approval. It’s like dogs will risk their lives and kill anything just to win approval.

On the other hand, the fanatics are easily reprogrammed with changing of the guards. Since they lack agency and critical mindset, they rely on the godhead to tell them what is right and wrong. So, if new bunch of people take over the godhead and changes the agenda, the fanatics will just go along. It’s like former Nazis adapted very easily to working for the Stasi. And former Japanese militarists were the most loyal dogs to Uncle Sam.

When I had my wisdom teeth out, they gave me some kind of opiod narcotic. They told me that it wasn’t morphine, but beyond that, I don’t remember. They also gave me some kind of sleeping medication. There was a moment (and it was only a moment. They told me to count backwards from 100, I think I made it to 95 or so) after the narcotic kicked in but before the sleeping medicine knocked me out that I will always remember as the single happiest moment of my life.

I guess these things affect different people differently. I have certainly drank to excess in my life, but I have never needed booze. Since my visit to the dental surgeon many years ago, I have never used narcotics either. I have to say, if it was available for unregulated purchase from a drug store, I would probably be in the same state of affairs as one of these souls on the Indian reservation. I’ve never tried to acquire it illegally, but if morphine (or reasonable morphine substitutes) were readily available legally, I can’t honestly say that I wouldn’t be an addict.

Don’t know why that is. I’ve just tried the link and it works fine for me, in two browsers. I’ll paste it in below without the html tags to see if that helps, but possibly it’s something to do with your browser settings. The page does come with the full, feminist-hated Daily Mail “sidebar of shame” with all the gossip links with pictures of scantily clad celebs, of which I’m sure Flashy would have heartily approved but which might set off some ad control software or similar. I can’t see an option for a printer-friendly version or similar that might help.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-506219/The-testament-Flashmans-creator-How-Britain-destroyed-itself.html

If it still doesn’t work, you can pick up the full version by picking up GMF’s autobiographical book from which it is an edited extract: The Light’s on at Signpost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light%27s_on_at_Signpost

I’ve just picked it up myself on Kindle for £5.24, on the basis that I really enjoyed his earlier memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, but somehow never got around to buying the later one.

Another option (that’s just occurred to me) is that I can just paste all the text of the DM article into a reply to you, but I don’t know how Steve will take that. I suppose he can always not approve it if he objects. I’ll post it below. If you see it, Steve’s presumably approved it.

What’s the best-estimate ratio on nature/nurture? 53/47 or something like that?

Knowing little about them, I’d go with that on drug and alcohol problems. People have lots of agency, but blank-slatism is false.

Full text of DM article linked and extracted above, posted below for the benefit of reader who can’t get the link to work on his browser. Apologies for length, but presumably it will be hidden by a [More] button:

The last testament of Flashman’s creator: How Britain has destroyed itself

by GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

Last updated at 00:13 05 January 2008

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes’s Victorian novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, political correctness hadn’t been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero’s character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness.

On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.

Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue – the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.

And no one minded, or if they did, they didn’t tell me. In all the many thousands of readers’ letters I received, not one objected.

In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

This is fine by me. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn’t an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I’d be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.

But what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy’s (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.

It’s not that they dislike the books. But where once the non-PC thing could pass unremarked, they now feel they must warn readers that some may find Flashman offensive, and that his views are certainly not those of the interviewer or reviewer, God forbid.

I find the disclaimers alarming. They are almost a knee-jerk reaction and often rather a nervous one, as if the writer were saying: “Look, I’m not a racist or sexist. I hold the right views and I’m in line with modern enlightened thought, honestly.”

They won’t risk saying anything to which the PC lobby could take exception. And it is this that alarms me – the fear evident in so many sincere and honest folk of being thought out of step.

I first came across this in the United States, where the cancer has gone much deeper. As a screenwriter [at which Fraser was almost as successful as he was with the 12 Flashman novels; his best-known work was scripting the Three Musketeers films] I once put forward a script for a film called The Lone Ranger, in which I used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen and was as spectacular as it was shocking – and true.

The whisky traders of the American plains used to build little stockades, from which they passed out their ghastly rot-gut liquor through a small hatch to the Indians, who paid by shoving furs back though the hatch.

The result was that frenzied, drunken Indians who had run out of furs were besieging the stockade, while the traders sat snug inside and did not emerge until the Indians had either gone away or passed out.

Political correctness stormed onto the scene, red in tooth and claw. The word came down from on high that the scene would offend “Native Americans”.

Their ancestors may have got pieeyed on moonshine but they didn’t want to know it, and it must not be shown on screen. Damn history. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen because we don’t like the look of it.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn’t present the picture they would like.

My forebears from the Highlands of Scotland were a fairly primitive, treacherous, blood-thirsty bunch and, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, would have been none the worse for washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate drivel like Braveheart.

The philosophy of political correctness is now firmly entrenched over here, too, and at its core is a refusal to look the truth squarely in the face, unpalatable as it may be.

Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.

It comes in many guises, some of them so effective that the PC can be difficult to detect. The silly euphemisms, apparently harmless, but forever dripping to wear away common sense – the naivete of the phrase “a caring force for the future” on Remembrance poppy trays, which suggests that the army is some kind of peace corps, when in fact its true function is killing.

The continual attempt to soften and sanitise the harsh realities of life in the name of liberalism, in an effort to suppress truths unwelcome to the PC mind; the social engineering which plays down Christianity, demanding equal status for alien religions.

The selective distortions of history, so beloved by New Labour, denigrating Britain’s past with such propaganda as hopelessly unbalanced accounts of the slave trade, laying all the blame on the white races, but carefully censoring the truth that not a slave could have come out of Africa without the active assistance of black slavers, and that the trade was only finally suppressed by the Royal Navy virtually single-handed.

In schools, the waging of war against examinations as “elitist” exercises which will undermine the confidence of those who fail – what an intelligent way to prepare children for real life in which competition and failure are inevitable, since both are what life, if not liberal lunacy, is about.

PC also demands that “stress”, which used to be coped with by less sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments lavished on griping incompetents who can’t do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen “traumatised” by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted.

Furthermore, it makes grieving part of the national culture, as it was on such a nauseating scale when large areas were carpeted in rotting vegetation in “mourning” for the Princess of Wales; and it insists that anyone suffering ordinary hardship should be regarded as a “victim” – and, of course, be paid for it.

That PC should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country’s decline.

No generation has seen their country so altered, so turned upside down, as children like me born in the 20 years between the two world wars. In our adult lives Britain’s entire national spirit, its philosophy, values and standards, have changed beyond belief.

Probably no country on earth has experienced such a revolution in thought and outlook and behaviour in so short a space.

Other lands have known what seem to be greater upheavals, the result of wars and revolutions, but these do not compare with the experience of a country which passed in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all.

This is not a lament for past imperial glory, though I regret its inevitable passing, nor is it the raging of a die-hard Conservative.

I loathe all political parties, which I regard as inventions of the devil. My favourite prime minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, not because he was on the Right, but because he spent a year in office without, on his own admission, doing a damned thing.

This would not commend him to New Labour, who count all time lost when they’re not wrecking the country.

I am deeply concerned for the United Kingdom and its future. I look at the old country as it was in my youth and as it is today and, to use a fine Scots word, I am scunnered.

I know that some things are wonderfully better than they used to be: the new miracles of surgery, public attitudes to the disabled, the health and well-being of children, intelligent concern for the environment, the massive strides in science and technology.

Yes, there are material blessings and benefits innumerable which were unknown in our youth.

But much has deteriorated. The United Kingdom has begun to look more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, run down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic.

My generation has seen the decay of ordinary morality, standards of decency, sportsmanship, politeness, respect for the law, family values, politics and education and religion, the very character of the British.

Oh how Blimpish this must sound to modern ears, how out of date, how blind to “the need for change and the novelty of a new age”. But don’t worry about me. It’s the present generation with their permissive society, their anything-goes philosophy, and their generally laid-back, inyerface attitude I feel sorry for.

They regard themselves as a completely liberated society when in fact they are less free than any generation since the Middle Ages.

Indeed, there may never have been such an enslaved generation, in thrall to hang-ups, taboos, restrictions and oppressions unknown to their ancestors (to say nothing of being neck-deep in debt, thanks to a moneylender’s economy).

We were freer by far 50 years ago – yes, even with conscription, censorship, direction of labour, rationing, and shortages of everything that nowadays is regarded as essential to enjoyment.

We still had liberty beyond modern understanding because we had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied to the youth of today.

We could say what we liked; they can’t. We were not subject to the aggressive pressure of specialinterest minority groups; they are. We had no worries about race or sexual orientation; they have. We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed PC to scorn, had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist.

We had available to us an education system, public and private, that was the envy of the world. We had little reason to fear being mugged or raped (killed in war, maybe, but that was an acceptable hazard).

Our children could play in street and country in safety. We had few problems with bullies because society knew how to deal with bullying and was not afraid to punish it in ways that would send today’s progressives into hysterics.

We did not know the stifling tyranny of a liberal establishment, determined to impose its views, and beginning to resemble George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

Above all, we knew who we were and we lived in the knowledge that certain values and standards held true, and that our country, with all its faults and need for reforms, was sound at heart.

Not any more. I find it difficult to identify a time when the country was as badly governed as it has been in the past 50 years.

We have had the two worst Prime Ministers in our history – Edward Heath (who dragooned us into the Common Market) and Tony Blair. The harm these two have done to Britain is incalculable and almost certainly irreparable.

Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable.

Short of assassination there is little people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their own way at all costs and hold public opinion in contempt.

I feel I speak not just for myself but for the huge majority of my generation who think as I do but whose voices are so often lost in the clamour.

We are yesterday’s people, the over-the-hill gang. (Yes, the old people – not the senior citizens or the time-challenged, but the old people.) Those of ultra-liberal views may take consolation from this – that my kind won’t be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace.

But they should beware. There may well be more who think like me than the liberal Left establishment likes to think. When my views were first published in book form in 2002, I was not surprised that almost all the reviewers were unfavourable. I had expected that my old-fashioned views would get a fairly hostile reception, but the bitterness did astonish me.

I had not realised how offensive the plain truth can be to the politically correct, how enraged they can be by its mere expression, and how deeply they detest the values and standards respected 50 years ago and which dinosaurs like me still believe in, God help us.

But the readers’ reactions to the book were the exact opposite of critical opinion. I have never received such wholehearted and generous support.

For the first time in 30 years as a professional writer I had to fall back on a printed card thanking readers for writing, apologising because I could not reply personally to them all.

Most of the letters came from the older generation, but by no means all. I was made aware that among the middle-aged and people in their 20s and 30s there is a groundswell of anger and frustration at the damage done to Britain by so-called reformers and dishonest politicians who hardly bother to conceal their contempt for the public’s wishes.

Plainly many thought they were alone in some reactionary minority. They had been led to think that they were voices muttering to themselves in the wilderness.

Well, you are not. There are more of you out there than you realise – very many more, perhaps even a majority.

• Edited extract from The Light’s On At Signpost by George MacDonald Fraser (published by Harper Collins)

Autothon may have the wrong gene; it may be the gene for skin color instead of for Vitamin D. But he is correct that people up north had different genes from those down south. That is the races have different genes. Females may also have selected more males with farming skills up north, and with hunting skills down south leading to different skills and social tendencies.

I hope you are not trying to prove that the races do not differ genetically. I suppose you know that Darwin wrote a book about evolution driven by sexual selection.

I think you’re probably right about that. Here in Ecuador where I’ve been for the past several months, the people speak poorly of the coastal people with a lot of mixed African and other blood. That’s where the thieves and drug dealers come from (well, that and Colombia).

It’s not the most sophisticated culture, as witnessed by the dearth of book stores, but I’d much rather live here than in some of the more culturally enriched areas of my own country.

Not even played for laughs?

Addiction isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom.

That’s right. It’s not the alcohol that screws people up. It’s screwed up people who turn to alcohol. This is why the ‘noble experiment’ failed. After a few years of prohibition it was noticed that people who were sound when they drank were still sound when sober, but people who were dysfunctional drunkards were now dysfunctional teetotalers.

In his last years, actor Richard Burton [1926-1984] said he’d never had a hangover until he was 48.

It’s a pity about Wikipedia – fine for any uncontentious stuff, poison where PC pieties are involved.

Not if you’re as spergy as I am.

According to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(1991_video_game)

…Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis was released in North America on Sunday, June 23, 1991.

But a Usenet posting indicates that it was being sold at some stores in California as early as Tuesday, June 11, 1991:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22sonic$20the$20hedgehog$20is$20indeed$20released$20as$20of$20today%22/rec.games.video/CgIpSUHEe3k/xv0DemgxtBwJ

Also, according to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(film)

…the first Star Wars movie was released theatrically in the U.S. on May 25 – the Wednesday before Memorial Day – in 1977.

But Star Wars had a staggered release schedule – it debuted in different cities on different dates. To give but two examples, it was released in Miami on June 17 and in Milwaukee on June 24 – both Fridays. (In Miami, it opened opposite Exorcist II: The Heretic, a notoriously bad film that consigned Linda Blair to D-lister status for the rest of her career.)

We spergs take our factoids seriously.

Jesuits perhaps were way too successful in civilizing Indians and had do be destroyed by TPTB.

Chiquitos and the music
https://bolivianthoughts.com/2014/02/24/bolivia-music-101-chiquitos-and-the-music-by-mario-vargas-llosa/

It was speculated that yerba mate grown and traded by Jesuits was a threat to British tea trade was one of the reason that contributed to the “destruction” of Jesuit order that lead to dissolution of their missions (reductions) in Southern and Northern America. Anyway, Indians fared much better under Spanish and French than under Portuguese and British in 17 and 18 centuries.

I’m “Irish” and a “heavy drinker” who does not get drunk easily. But, I get terrible hangovers if I overindulge (i.e. drink enough that it’s obvious to others that I’ve been drinking). It’s the fear of hangover that keeps me to a max of four drinks a day.

This seems to be the pattern for my other “Gaelic Irish” relatives.

My “Scots Irish” relatives are on a different playing field. They’re just-getting-started at the point where I’m all-done. I don’t know “how they do it.” If they get hangovers like I do they’re a lot tougher than I am. Maybe that’s the difference.

And how many American kids got free education at elite Peruvian universities as remuneration for our training their offspring?

I’m a Boston native. I’ve been burned too many times by the Boston Globe. TL;DR

I also noticed this.

Do you have any theories as to why Native Americans seem relatively immune to the blandishments of the multi cultural identity politics left?

“You’ll notice that even before the era of Vitamin D supplementation, Africans and olive skinned races transplanted to New England or Europe did not drop like flies from Vitamin D deficiency but before modern migration there was a pretty even spectrum of coloration from inky black to pale based on how far north you were.”

But also:

“Vitamin D supplements ‘advised for everyone’”, Smitha Mundasad, BBC, 21 July 2016:

“…Black and Asian people should also consider the supplements all year round…

…”Previously we felt that everybody would get enough from the sunlight…”…

…”This is new advice based on evidence looked at over the last five years.”…”

“Can immigrants from Asia get their vitamin D naturally?”, Rebecca Oshiro, Vitamin D Council, June 8, 2013:

“…In an effort to estimate just how much vitamin D dark-skinned individuals can make during exposure to sunlight, UK researchers exposed a group of people of South Asian ethnicity to several different doses of UV radiation…

…Ninety percent had levels less than 10 ng/mL and eighteen people had levels less than 5 ng/mL, the latter a serious deficiency state which can cause rickets and osteomalacia…

…even with a three-fold increase in UV exposure, those of South Asian ethnicity are not able to make sufficient vitamin D at northern latitudes wearing casual clothing. Those receiving the larger doses of UV radiation were left with an average vitamin D blood level of only 15 ng/mL…

…Based on the studies by these authors it will be difficult, if not impossible, for those with darker skin to achieve a natural vitamin D level from sun exposure alone…

…It is therefore imperative that those with the darker skin types living in areas of the world far from where their skin types evolved supplement with oral vitamin D year round to avoid the startling deficiency states observed in this study. If they want to make their own vitamin D, they likely have to expose more skin and get even longer periods of sun exposure.”

Based on:

“Efficacy of a dose range of simulated sunlight exposures in raising vitamin D status in South Asian adults: implications for targeted guidance on sun exposure”, Mark D Farrar, Ann R Webb, Richard Kift, Marie T Durkin, Donald Allan, Annie Herbert, Jacqueline L Berry, and Lesley E Rhodes, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, June 2013
vol. 97 no. 6 1210-1216.

Northwestern Europeans tend to be introverted in comparison to Mediterraneans. We need a little aqua vitae (i.e., whiskey) to give us enough “game” to continue our family lines.

For comparison, consider people descended from Yiddish Speakers to Persian Jews. They may or may not have similar levels of extraversion but, are Persian Jews ever self-hating? Do they tend to be angst-ridden(i.e., Germanic)? Do these groups have different rates of alcoholism?

The archaeological record of the mound-building Mississippian culture, centered on Cahokia in S. Illinois, argues that these tribes were fairly advanced, and seemingly poised to enter the Bronze Age when the climate recovered, but the arrival of the Europeans shattered their culture’s progress, and sent the survivors on the long road to Skid Row, reservation style.

That’s it! Global climate change, no doubt cause by the white devils, ruined the noble Native Americans!

Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture that developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1000 years before European contact.

[…]
Historian Daniel Richter notes that the apex of the city occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.

Aren’t you contradicting this Mr. Richter that you mention? If the apex of of the mound-building Mississippian culture was during the Med. Warming Period, then decline was underway before white devils penetrated the interior of the continent.

/////////

… but the arrival of the Europeans shattered their culture’s progress…

Any worthwhile human culture should be able to defend itself from foreign invasion. Tough luck for the noble Natives.

“Keep in mind that the # of hunter-gatherers left (especially pure blooded ones) is minuscule anyway. N. America was always thinly populated but after the white people showed up the native American population collapsed, mainly due to epidemics rather than massacre.

Anyway, the Indians were not exactly hunter-gatherers. ”

There are plenty of pure-blooded hunter-gatherers left in Western Canada, Northern Canada and Alaska. There population is expanding, in fact. And they have a terrible problem with drugs and alcohol.

None of these people were farmers.

I’ve noticed that people in eastern North America who haven’t had much experience around full blooded Natives seem to have rather romantic, unrealistic ideas about them.

After about 400 ce the more spectacular features of the Hopewell culture gradually disappeared.

Hopewell culture
NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE

WRITTEN BY: The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
LAST UPDATED: 1-30-2009 See Article History
Alternative Title: Mound Builders
…

Hopewell culture, notable ancient Indian culture of the east-central area of North America. It flourished from about 200 bce to 500 ce chiefly in what is now southern Ohio, with related groups in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and New York. The name is derived from the Hopewell farm in Ross county, Ohio, where the first site—centring on a group of burial mounds with extensive enclosures of banked earth—was explored. The term Mound Builders, once applied to this culture, is now considered a misnomer. Later investigations revealed that the practice of constructing earth mounds was widespread and served greatly differing purposes.

…

Hopewell villages lay along rivers and streams. The inhabitants raised corn (maize) and possibly beans and squash but still relied upon hunting and fishing and the gathering of wild nuts, fruits, seeds, and roots. The amount of pottery and ornamental stonework and metalwork that has been found suggests some division of labour; moreover, the nature and size of the earthworks at many sites suggest that forms of public labour, whether voluntary or conscripted, may have been employed. The earthworks sometimes suggest defensive purposes, but more often they served as burial mounds or apparently formed the bases of temples or other structures.

…

After about 400 ce the more spectacular features of the Hopewell culture gradually disappeared. The quantity and quality of fine articles and mounds declined, and the people apparently became less sedentary and more loosely organized.

Conclusion: Native Americans of east-central North America were in decline before white devils arrived.

I agree that addiction is not just genetic. Although there are few Jewish alcoholics, because of the long ancestral exposure to alcohol and other agricultural products, the few Jewish alcoholics I can think of, such as Billy Joel and comedian/podcaster Marc Maron, have some kind of personality disorder that overrides their genes.

People often contrast the Jewish non-drinking tendency with the Irish, whose Celtic ancestors had a much shorter period of time for their ancestors to adapt to booze, hence the raging alcoholism.

One of the differences between the United States and Canada (particularly northern and western Canada) is that 95% of Americans seem to have had no contact with actual Amerindians. Even kneejerk Canadian SJWs are aware that many of the people they would insist on calling “First Nations” or “indigenous” have a booze problem. The Canadian equivalent of NPR had no issue interviewing the Cree author of a recent book on the subject.

The book: Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (and Yours) , by Harold Johnson

The interview: Indigenous people need to tell their stories of sobriety, says lawyer

Alcohol, tobacco and casinos, among others, have a predatory aspect to their business model. The same aspect occurs in loan services (see David Dayen’s book), payday lenders and such. Ethics and morals seem so old fashioned these days.

“Anti-Semites”

http://conservative-headlines.org/jews-scramble-as-second-israeli-arrested-for-jcc-threats/

http://newobserveronline.com/jew-jcc-threat-makers-paid-bitcoin/

I am certainly not advocating prohibition. Moreover, I am not a teetotaler, so I have an interest in there being some place to buy booze.

As you say, drunks have agency, and they bear the responsibility of being drunks. By the same token, the store owner has agency, and he is deciding to make his living off of human misery. I don’t think people like that should get a pass – they should come in for social opprobrium.

Sherman Alexie openly says that Indians can’t handle liquor, and he’s an Indian himself. Why don’t people just take Indians’ word for it? I do…

My family has its share of drunks, but for the most part we are just drinkers. Being a drunk in a mostly Scottish and Irish family is actually a pretty high bar. You have to put away the equivalent of about a quart a day for men and maybe a fifth or a very little less for women. Sounds like a lot, but I can assure you that I have seen it done regularly by people to whom I am related and therefore know intimately. When a pint of whiskey is “just warming up” you know you’ve got a real champ.

My recently departed grandpa who died in his early 90s was a drinker rather than a drunk. Moderation was a couple martinis and a half bottle of wine per day, with a cigar and some cognac to cap it off. He might have lived another five years if it weren’t for the drink, tobacco and roast beef, but would it have been worth it?

On the other hand, the real drunks experience some ghastly problems, often related to social dysfunction, so there’s a case to be made for tee-totaling, although it’s frowned upon because it suggests that the teetotaler cannot hold his liquor.

What I have noticed is that the more nordic members of my family (the Norwegian side) are not only less capable of holding their liquor, but more likely to be teetotalers as well. It’s a reasonable solution (even if it is unfortunate), so I fully support Indians’ efforts in regards to their own communities.

Finns, BTW, who probably have more hunter gatherer ancestry than any other European nationality, notoriously lose control of themselves when they drink. It’s all the more stunning because they are such reserved people in most circumstances, but give them a bottle of vodka and out comes the cursing and the knife and off come the clothes. According to accounts I’ve read (Francis Parkman), this is exactly what happened to American Indians when under the influence.

I live near a rez and have worked with Indians over the years. This wouldn’t surprise me as they seem very uninterested in SJW narratives and being viewed as a tragic people. They have serious problems but seem open to try actual solutions as opposed to starting civil war 2.

Alcohol, tobacco and casinos, among others, have a predatory aspect to their business model.

Let’s not forget the diamond engagement ring scam.

My “Scots Irish” relatives are on a different playing field.

What we call “Scots Irish” have, to a large degree, anglo-saxon ancestry; i.e., they are partly germanic, and so descend from a people who have a longer history with alcohol.

“The FBI handed over the information to the Israel Police after finding that these threats too had originated from Israel. Using innovative technology, the police were able to identify the suspect’s home.”
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.779087

Finally FBI did some good work benefiting Trump.

In addition to what you point out, the Indians had their own world view and land-management style, which was quite different from what had developed in the British Isles. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land examines in detail the Indian ways and how they contrasted with those of the English.
Much of the agricultural produce of the modern world comes from the original domestication efforts of the natives of the Americas, from vanilla to potatoes.
In the southeastern present-day United States, the DeSoto expedition of 1539 marched through well-settled lands with fields yielding two and three crops a year. DeSoto was well aware of the agricultural richness of the lands he was invading, because he intended his force of 600 men and 300 horses plus scores of war dogs to live off the provisions extracted from the native inhabitants. Although he did bring along a herd of pigs and a limited food supply, it would of course not be possible for him to bring enough provisions to supply a years-long expedition. Indian corn was the golden fuel of the invaders.
When DeSoto’s forces came to the Choctaw town of Mabila (present-day Selma, Ala.), they were faced with a 15-foot high wooden palisade coated in mud to retard fire. Here he demanded corn and other foodstuffs, sex slaves, guides and porters. When the usual Spanish treachery resulted in resistance, the Spanish killed 2,500 inhabitants of the town and burned it, then went on a rampage looting, slaughtering and burning other towns, leaving a wasteland behind them, as well as the usual collection of epidemic diseases that wiped out populations long after the Spanish had gone.
Any future the Amerindians might have had was destroyed in the first decades of the 16th century by European contact — and not necessarily armed invasions. Contact with fishermen along the northeast coast transmitted measles, smallpox, scarlet fever, and assorted other infections, including possibly the plague, to a vulnerable population.
When John Smith sailed up from Virginia to survey Boston Bay in 1614, he reported the area as thickly populated and heavily planted with carefully tended fields, gardens and well-cultivated mulberry and blueberry bushes. He counted 40 native towns between Cape Cod and Penobscot Bay. “The sea coast as you pass shews all along large Corne fields,” he wrote. He remarked on the many groves of fruit and nut trees and well-tended gardens of beans, squash and greens, as well as the corn fields. He described the country as most healthful and fertile.
Yet just a few years later, when the Pilgrims arrived, the whole coastline was empty of cultivators. Their cleared fields were there, but the people themselves had perished, perhaps by diseases introduced by Smith.
Indian New England Before the Mayflower provides detail on this.
We can’t know how the native inhabitants of North America would have evolved their civilization as the climate improved. But to describe them all as simple savages with no culture worth preserving or capable of development is wrong.

Alcoholism has a clearly genetic component. Most educated people with political views across the spectrum who’ve seen alcoholism don’t find that a controversial or hard to accept point.

I’ve known alcoholics including people who’ve been to AA: it’s actually really hard for them to avoid alcohol. And if they consume, it’s hard for them to limit their intake.

My Italian relatives often drink wine at normal family meals, the wine carafe is a standard fixture on the family table. But no one gets drunk and that isn’t a problem that they have to consciously avoid. I don’t think they have naturally high tolerance, some can get buzzed off of a single glass, but they just lack any natural urge to drink excessively.

I have vices, like procrastinating, or commenting on blogs when I should be working, but I’ve never had the urge to consume more than a glass of alcohol. That urge probably has a genetic origin.

Very interesting post.

I’d like the SJWs to be reprogrammed before they start cracking our skulls in great number but the people controlling them seem to want us gone.

With the communists and Nazis, the leader was clear. But SJWs seem to be lead by the Borg.

…those with the darker skin types living in areas of the world far from where their skin types evolved

These folks matter-of-factly acknowledge what is actually going on. I suspect they do (and can) because they are writing in a professional or academic journal. I’ve noticed the trend that we intelligent persons are permitted to speak plainly in such fora but never in the popular media. It reminds one of the taboo among adults about discussing sex, violence, and death in the presence of children. It thus gives the lie that the taboos are all really no more believed by the intelligent among those who spout them than are tales of Santa and the Tooth Fairy these same persons may tell their toddlers…or, returning from the analogy, to the less intelligent (and black, brown, mentally ill, etc.) to whom they tell fairy stories for placation and manipulation….

By the by: I’m quite white and I take 3,000 IU of Vitamin D daily on my physician’s orders even though I live in California and run marathons – we damn near all of us suffer deficiency now because of sunscreen and indoor work….

The area around Chadron is quite nice. I thought about retiring there once.

The cause of “alcoholism” is any kind of personal dysfunction that includes or involves the drinking of too much alcohol. There is no need to medicalize the dysfunction or to search for root causes in genetics or anything else. The very word “alcoholism” and its cognates ought to be abolished. There is no important difference between being a messed up person and being a messed up person who drinks.

I agree 100%. Addiction is a myth. An “alcoholic” is someone who chooses to drink too much. A heroin “addict” is someone who chooses to use heroin. There are no addicts, just people who go on making poor choices.

It all depends largely whether they descend from highlanders or borderers…

And what did you or your ancestors contribute to Chartres cathedral?

While it has become common in our time to refer to alcoholism as a disease, it really isn’t. Instead, it is sin. The Bible repeatedly condemns drunkenness and we, as human beings, are not to get drunk. The Bible is clear about that.

And why aren’t we supposed to get drunk? Because God loves us and He wants what is best for us. And when people get drunk, they not only cause harm to themselves, they also harm their families and communities.

There are many Bible verses about not getting drunk but here are a few:

“Woe to those who rise early in the morning, that they may run after strong drink, who tarry late into the evening till wine inflames them!”
Isaiah 5:11

“Now a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher, no drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and no lover of money.”
1 Timothy 3:2-3

“Do you not know that the unrighteousness will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”
1 Corinthians 6:10-11

“In my military travels, I later ran into German officers who could sit on bar stools and drink for hours without noticeable effect. In the field with the Germans, I also once had the experience of “beer call” in their tents. Propped up against the bunks in the tents while we drank were their automatic weapons and ammunition. No issues … no problems.”

Could it also be something to do with the brew itself? I notice I seem to have almost unlimited tolerance and little to no hangover with German beer in Germany, yet even a little British ale, for example, is pure gut rot with many unpleasant side effects, in my experience.

We can’t know how the native inhabitants of North America would have evolved their civilization as the climate improved

Again you’re saying that how the native inhabitants of North America were the helpless victims of climate change.

… But to describe them all as simple savages with no culture worth preserving or capable of development is wrong.

Why is it wrong? Divers peoples all around planet Earth developed beyond the level of the native Americans during the centuries of this distressing climate change that you’re weeping about.

Your gauche efforts to create sympathy for the Indians is making them seem dumber and dumber instead. “Capable of development” — that’s really quite patronizing.

This is like saying that you “choose” to eat food. You could, thru willpower, abstain from food for a few days but after a while you would think of nothing but food – it would occupy your thoughts day and night, you would do anything to get some. If I tell you that it would prolong your life to adopt a semi-starvation diet (this has been proven in mice), you would understand it on an intellectual level, but you probably won’t be willing to live with constant gnawing hunger every day of your life. On one level, this can be seen as a “poor choice” on your part -one that will lead you to an earlier grave.

The craving that addicts have for their drug is far stronger than your craving for food.

Doubtful. There are minor differences between brews but they are all basically malted (sprouted) barley, water, hops and yeast. Sometime the barley is roasted darker or lighter, there are different varieties of hops, the beer is stronger or weaker, etc. but it’s all more or less the same thing.

but the goal should be to force the inclusion of facts from hard science, i.e. biology and genetics

Why? Anyone with a grain of common sense knows that Wikipedia is chock full of cant and Lysenkoism and just regard the info there accordingly.

When the Jews were expelled from France around the time the cathedral was built, all of their wealth was confiscated, so quite a bit I would say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_France#Expulsion_from_France.2C_1182

We also contributed Jesus, without whom there would be no cathedral in the 1st place. Without Judaism there is no Christianity.

This sounds like a highly cherry picked account. Some of it is just plain false. All of the important tree fruits (apples, pears, cherries, peaches, plums, mulberries, etc.) are native to either Asia or Europe and would have been unknown to the Indians. They might have planted blueberry and cranberry bushes (more likely picked wild ones) but these are not trees. There would have been zero groves of fruit trees in New England. None, nada.

I’ve known alcoholics including people who’ve been to AA: it’s actually really hard for them to avoid alcohol. And if they consume, it’s hard for them to limit their intake.

The baseball impresario Mike Veeck went through the 12-step program for his drinking, but now takes the occasional tipple, evidently because he is more uncomfortable with the absolutism than afraid of a relapse.

Is he an outlier, or is this more common than we hear of? Veeck is even crazier than his famous dad, which is saying something. But in a controlled, fun way.

Which, come to think of it, is how alcohol itself should be dealt with.

Hillary Clinton is on the case or else perhaps is one of those “badthinkers” who think there’s a problem, it’s confusing:

“Growing Together: Hillary Clinton’s Vision for Building a Brighter Future for Native Americans”, extract from Hillary Clinton’s campaign web site, Indigenous Policy Journal, Vol 27, No 1 (2016):

“…Hillary Clinton believes the United States has a sacred trust with Native Americans…

…At the core of Clinton’s agenda is a simple idea: every child in America should be able to live up to his or her God-given potential…

…As President, Hillary will:

…Combat Drug and Alcohol Addiction: Drug and alcohol addiction rates for Native Americans are significantly higher than the country’s average. Hillary believes we must tackle this epidemic. That’s why she has proposed a $10 billion nationwide Initiative to Combat America’s Deadly Epidemic of Drug and Alcohol Addiction. Her comprehensive plan will empower Tribal Governments to help their own citizens by implementing preventive programming, investing in treatment and recovery, and ensuring that all first responders have access to naloxone.”

I have vices, like procrastinating, or commenting on blogs when I should be working

Amen. What alcohol is to hitherto uncontacted hunter-gatherers, the smartphone is to everyone I know who has one, myself included. We have no inherited resistance. I can still remember how much I used to accomplish.

Addiction is a myth. An “alcoholic” is someone who chooses to drink too much. A heroin “addict” is someone who chooses to use heroin. There are no addicts, just people who go on making poor choices.

We like to pat ourselves on the back for our virtue. But there’s a fairly good chance that a big chunk of this is hard-wired into our genes at the moment of conception. It’s luck of the draw as to whether we’re born intelligent, hard-working and largely immune to addictive substances.

No idea, sorry.

One theory is that we develop an aversion to alcohol because the first time we taste it, the next thing that happens is someone snips off our foreskin.

It’s possible you’ve an undiagnosed allergy to some ingredient (e.g., a variety of hop or an incidental product added for flavour) in the one beverage but not the other. Do not underestimate the effect an allergen can have: indigestion, dermatological problems, anaphylaxis….

Different fermantation byproducts, perhaps. One often unrecognized thing about hangovers is that they’re not only the result of ethanol but also other alcohols that are produced in smaller quantities in the fermantation process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusel_alcohol

I noticed early on in my drinking career that I had extreme hangovers after some particular drinks. It made no sense that I’d have a worse hangover after a couple of cans of weak cider than after a bottle of vodka… until I read the sugars in fruits are especially prone to turning into methanol during fermentation. I looked up the methanol content in various drinks and bingo, it’s like a list of what causes bad hangovers for me.

Perhaps you are sensitive to some byproduct that only turns up in some brews.

You do understand that the English used the vocabulary of their homeland to describe the plants and animals they saw in the new world?
I cited published references by well-known authorities in their fields. Anyone can read them and verify what I wrote.

Either that or they were lying/exaggerating/imagining things. There is nothing that American Indians had that in any way, shape or form resembled a grove of fruit trees. A patch of wild blueberry or cranberry bushes (the large cultivated blueberries that we have today were developed in New Jersey in the 19th century), the closest thing the Indians had to fruit bearing plants, looks nothing like a tree orchard, not even from a distance. The Indians didn’t usually plant these anyway but just collected from the abundant wild stocks. Even today in Maine wild blueberries are harvested from naturally occurring plants.

There were a lot of these accounts by explorers – remember El Dorado? They usually were trying to encourage immigration or had some other ulterior motive for exaggerating what they saw.

The Scots Irish were mostly lowlanders and borderers.

Eskimo is fine. My neighbor is an Eskimo from Alaska. She doesn’t care to be called Inuit at all. She prefers being known as Eskimo. They are different people. Very different, according to her.

On a road trip with a friend in the Southwest, we once stayed in Gallup, NM on a Friday night. Most pathetic thing I ever saw. Drunk Indians sprawled all along a main street of liquor stores and bars.

One’s heart cries out, but for what? You can’t fix it, they can’t fix it, and yet, you wish to Heaven something could fix it.

Wikipedia begs to differ.

About fifteen or twenty years ago, I saw a PBS/BBC documentary presented by the versatile Jonathan Miller, himself a doctor, in which he embarks on a drinking experiment with an East Asian volunteer, in order to illustrate the effect of the genes that affect alcohol metabolism in the human body.

By the second drink, the East Asian colleague is visibly plastered, while the Englishman Miller is still talking and presenting the show as if he had not had a drink at all.

I’ve been trying to find the video online but no luck.

Please note that the french edition puts Tchad first, with Indians (from India I surmise) second, drinking twice as much as Germans, French or Americans.

I would say that the purpose of a people is to create art and beauty which is worshipful and pleasing to God, and to keep making more people so the chain remains unbroken. Different peoples have a different conception of God, but it is not interchangeable. Exposure to cultures very different from ones own creates doubt about the unique divine narrative of his people. If his life is not comfortable, he seeks to dominate those who caused the doubt as to abate his questioning, and make himself more comfortable in the process. If his living conditions were already comfortable, he abandons his people’s belief system, and within a few generations, his genetic line is extinguished.

So I would say exposure to non-Christian culture + technology based comfort = Amerikaner cultural suicide.

It’s interesting that this post hoc theory does not apply to Jews; they are usually exposed to other cultures, are comfortable, and continue to breed. But do they think they are comfortable? Is that the evolutionary purpose of Woody Allen style neurosis? To create a false discomfort which allows procreation to continue? (Insert rememberthatwesuffered.avi meme)

Serious question: If most Jews are atheists, why continue with this barbaric child abuse?

An obvious solution is to only serve White Russians in neighbouring towns, since most Native Americans are lactose intolerant.

Yeah Jack D you’re right on that one . At that Gallup N.M. res gas station the silence seemed natural and normal . Where I’m from it would mean somethings wrong . Btw this place is right off of Route 40 , not out in the middle of nowhere .

10 million Jews worldwide vs several hundred million white Gentiles. No one here worries that they will not be a around in 500 years.

While it has become common in our time to refer to alcoholism as a disease, it really isn’t. Instead, it is sin.

The churches were a lot better attended when sin was seen as similar to disease, rather than it’s opposite.

So you have more in common with American Indians who contributed their stolen land on which, say Washington Memorial, was built than with those who actually built the Memorial or the Chartres cathedral, right?

We like to pat ourselves on the back for our virtue. But there’s a fairly good chance that a big chunk of this is hard-wired into our genes at the moment of conception. It’s luck of the draw as to whether we’re born intelligent, hard-working and largely immune to addictive substances.

Probably, but we still have the choice whether or not to give in to the urge or not. Any genetic proclivity merely affects how hard that choice is for a particular individual.

And there’s no reason to believe that there is any such thing as an urge that’s truly irresistible given even reasonable degrees of willpower and self control, or that such willpower is not accessible to all given the choice to exercise it.

Imo, it’s necessary to hold to the view that all such behaviour that involves giving in to temptation, from alcoholism to drug abuse to homosexual and other sexually perverted behaviour, is ultimately a matter of personal choice (and therefore responsibility). If you are Christian then this is a matter of basic faith. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of believing in free will and personal responsibility for actions as a matter of principle.

By all means sympathise with alcoholics, homosexuals etc, but don’t take away their human agency and responsibility for their own lives.

My husband’s part-Irish ancestry includes an alcoholic grandmother and great-grandfather. His own father didn’t drink but smoked for years and, in later life, seemed to develop a gambling addiction.

I would argue that, in addition to a genetic propensity for substance abuse, there is also a genetic propensity for adrenaline addiction. One of my husband’s grandfathers turned out to be at least partly Ashkenazi Jewish (husband’s genetics show him to be about 1/8) and a first cousin to an infamous Jewish gangster (whom I had never heard of) who was reputed to be quite bright. There are various men of direct descent who also appear to have been extremely intelligent but prone to addictive behavior. One brother-in-law apparently took enormous risks with drugs and delinquency in his youth, but eventually got his education and a very highly-paid job. Our own older son is extremely bright, but despite being raised by parents who rarely drink and don’t smoke, regularly does both and has evinced a definite propensity for risk taking (which I would argue dates back to toddlerhood and going down a swimming pool slide head first and screaming with glee and demanding more). His younger brother would never have done such a thing and remains an extremely cautious individual.

Mountain, The Comanche adopted some children into their tribe, mostly girls that they also raped and abused. Young boys were sometimes kept as virtual slaves as were teen and adult women. When they had no value to the tribe they were eliminated. A great read on the Comanche, well researched and foot noted, is “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S.C. Gwynne. The book is a real page turner.

For obvious evolutionary reasons, namely lack of exposure to farmed carbohydrates, Indians are genetically at great risk for alcoholism and diabetes. This has been known for generations…

I believe a distinction needs to be made regarding the physiological aspect of addiction with the psychological and emotional aspect. And when I talk about addiction I am referring to mood altering substances such as alcohol or drugs, not food or gambling or shopping.

Physical addiction is a quite real result from overindulgence in alcohol or drugs. The body reacts strongly when the substance is not in the system which is known as detox or withdrawal.

There may be a genetic component in a propensity for substance abuse. But one is responsible for their behavior and its results whether or not one holds to the prevailing disease model regarding addiction.

A great read on the Comanche, well researched and foot noted, is “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S.C. Gwynne. The book is a real page turner.

Agreed. Read this on the strength of an iStever recommendation, and it was eye opening.

By the by: I’m quite white and I take 3,000 IU of Vitamin D daily on my physician’s orders even though I live in California and run marathons – we damn near all of us suffer deficiency now because of sunscreen and indoor work….

Also worth mentioning that there seems to be a fair distance between “not-deficient” and “optimal” for vitamin D. Also that production of vitamin D declines with age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2997282

And then there’s seasonality. Do you supplement the same amount year round?

Good for you! St. Augustine used to say “I believe in order to understand” and “I understand in order to better believe”. Faith and reason working together. The Catholic Church has a superb understanding of both man and Creation, only of course individuals have to do a little reading.

As to collective sin, that does not sound catholic. I would say not even christian, but difficult to be sure. Sin, virtue and salvation, are individual. We are, of course, a community in Christ. And then there’s the concept of the common good, as well as social doctrine.

As an English speaker, you have great resources online:
Ignatius.com
Ignatiusinsight.com
Firstthings.com
Thecatholicthing.com
Catholiceducation.org

Oh, and if you know others, please tell.

I strongly disagree. Willpower is both useful and important, but the degree of cravings experienced by different people appear to differ drastically. I do believe that a heroin addict is someone who is stupid enough to try heroin and unlucky enough to be vulnerable, but for alcoholism in our society that pretty much translates to unlucky enough to be vulnerable.

Regarding alcoholism, I think there are two major metabolic areas that are both genetic.

The first is toleration, for example the Asian flush. If you can’t tolerate alcohol I think it is harder to drink enough to become alcoholic. I think other aspects of liver metabolism of alcohol are relevant here including the conversion into acetaldehyde and subsequent detox of that:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3519419

The second is reward. The mechanism I have seen discussed relates to fatty acids (especially GLA) in the prostaglandin metabolic pathway. Here is an article, the beginning looks helpful: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/748797_2
Though I laugh at the literature search they did to come up with (look up Horrobin):

There is no literature to date, associating PUFAS as a potential treatment to prevent compulsion for alcohol.

Figure 1 in this: http://www.centeronbehavioralmedicine.com/web_pages_behavioral_medicine/2_Body%20Mind/2-2_Essential%20Nutrients/Background%20Information/Horrobin-clinical_use_fatty_acids.html
shows the relevant metabolic pathway (on the left).
The issue appears to be that alcohol inhibits D6D (which produces GLA) AND enhances the conversion of DGLA into PGE1. So the overall effect is that alcohol causes production of PGE1 (feels good) but starves production of GLA so reserves are depleted (does not feel good later).
David Horrobin has been the primary advocate of this idea: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6253773
More detail in a non-research format: https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/making-it-practical/tripping-lightly-down-the-prostaglandin-pathways/
Worth emphasizing the comments about D6D problems being considered related to alcoholism.

I think this both explains the positive effect most people experience from alcohol AND the larger effect some feel (probably caused by defects in their prostaglandin pathway?).

In short, being able to tolerate alcohol and experiencing a great reward from it are genetic risk factors for alcoholism. Couple that with induced tolerance causing a need for greater dosage to achieve the same effect and I think one is well on the way to addiction.

To anyone who sees a large positive response to alcohol followed by vicious payback it might be worth looking into GLA supplementation (e.g. EPO – evening primrose oil). That and NAC for liver detox are worth trying for hangover minimization IMHO (I rarely drink, and very little then, so no firsthand experience though).

P.S. Associated piece of trivia is that GLA is most often used as a supplement for PMS which might help explain stories like this: http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/women-recovery/290989-alcoholism-pms.html

Thanks. Can you point me to a reference for methanol content of alcoholic drinks? I tried searching and did not find anything especially useful.

I strongly disagree. Willpower is both useful and important, but the degree of cravings experienced by different people appear to differ drastically.

This doesn’t refute dfordoom’s point, merely argues that for some people a higher level of self-discipline and willpower is required to resist temptation in particular areas.

If you go down the road of hypothesizing that some people are just born incapable of resisting temptation in a particular area, you are travelling the demonstrably counterproductive road that was travelled on homosexual behaviour, whereby you create different classes of human being for whom the rules must be different because their choices are not their responsibility. That’s iniquitous, imo.

By all mean have sympathy for those facing greater temptation to engage in self-destructive activity, but don’t take away their human agency and responsibility.