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From my new book review in Taki’s Magazine:
Faded Roots
Steve SailerJune 15, 2022At age 86, David Hackett Fischer, author of the landmark 1989 book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (which is perhaps the most influential work of American history in the last third of a century), has returned to try to apply his magnum opus’ method to African Americans in African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals.
In Albion’s Seed, Fischer offered a framework for how to think about the first three centuries of American history. Most early migrants to the United States from the island shared by England, Wales, and Scotland, which ancient Greek geographers called “Albion,” can be divided into four groups:
In the first half of the 17th century, about 20,000 Puritans moved to New England to found a progressive utopia where everything not forbidden was mandatory. From there they spread out across the northern latitudes of the United States, with Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco as the ultimate post-Puritan progressive outposts.
In the middle of the 17th century, while the leftist Puritans were temporarily on top in English politics, rightist Cavaliers migrated from England to Virginia to more or less reproduce the English class structure in their own conservative utopia. Moving out from the Chesapeake Bay, their descendants populated the lowland South.
In the late 17th century, William Penn set up Pennsylvania as a moderate utopia for his fellow Quakers, and invited Continental Europeans of similar religious values. From there they dispersed across the upper middle latitudes of the United States, with Southern California as the eventual end of the line for the Midlanders.
Finally, from 1715 to 1775, the Scots-Irish from the violent border region of England and Scotland, often with a stop in Northern Ireland, headed for the American frontier. They preferred healthy if hardscrabble highlands like the Appalachians and Ozarks to the richer but more fever-ridden lowlands. They established an ornery utopia of minimal government, from which, once your neighbors started to get on your nerves, you’d light out for the latest frontier. …
In his new book African Founders, Fischer attempts to apply his famous Albion’s Seed methodology to African Americans by tracking the black populations of different American colonies back to their African tribal homelands.
This is an exciting ambition because Americans, white and black, tend to think of blacks as a largely homogeneous people with no history before 1619.
Read the whole thing there.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Interesting premise, I want to read this, but the Albion’s Seed groups were coming voluntarily and with their cultures intact. I really don’t see how a strong parallel can be made.
——-
Recent 4chan comment reacting to the blue district in Tejas going temporarily red, relevant because of a broad statement about “black culture” I think most here would agree with:
Anonymous (ID: RaHBGQEx)
06/14/22(Tue)23:17:06 No.382399840
>>382394706 (OP) #
I don’t know why or how the [D]emocrat party has missed this (other than the age old adage of ‘the [D]emocrats are the real racists!’) but it seems as though their plan was to treat [H]ispanics like they did blacks. Black Americans have no real cultural history, and no ethnic heritage other than ‘Our skin is black, we are brothers’. I genuinely believe [Democrats] view [H]ispanics as just one ethnicity with no variation between say a Mexican and a Chilean. Somehow they overlooked just how much different [H]ispanic groups [Democratt]ING HATE EACH OTHER.
I also worked from 18-23 with mostly [H]ispanics, the ones who are here legally hate the ones trying to come and get free gibs when they did it the right way. Honestly the only [H]ispanics I see crying for an open borders policy are the ones who are second and third generation who only have citizenship because they were born here after their parents/grandparents hopped the border. Hell, my brother in law has no papers and even he says we need the military at the border.
He should have just done New York.
Maybe get a sympathetic Jewish coauthor to cover that flank. If Stephen Miller exists, you can find *someone*.
-----
I'm disappointed to be confirmed in my suspicions (you can't do a black Albion's Seed for several good reasons) but I'll still probably read it for the anecdotes.
OT –
Man pretending to be woman incarcerated in men’s prison sues for discrimination:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/06/09/transgender-woman-incarcerated-in-mens-prison-sues-for-discrimination
One consequence of the adoration only attitude towards balcks is to make life boring. I wonder what makes capable minds like Fischer’s take the path down Desolation Row? – Hard to believe, that a novel with the following (sardonic, sarcastic, satirical, self-mockingly (not least) funny…) words was awarded the Pulitzer price once upon a time – so – fasten your seatbelts for an anti-David-Hackett-Fischer-Fischer’s mind numbing woke-succumbing attitude’s – literary wild ride:
I envy the black man’s ability, to sow fear nd loathing in the hearts of the white proletariat. The negro is scaremongeering everybody simply for being a negro, while I have to try real hard to achieve the same effect. Maybe it would have been better, if I had been born as a negro myself. I imagine that I would have been a rather tall one (well above average) – and a rather scary negro, who would have pressed his huge loins in streetcars against the wilting hips of elderly white ladies.
(A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, published 1980)
OK, that was neither here not there, but I will read your Takimag column after breakfast, Steve. Though it was perhaps too long, I liked Albion's Seed, which I read ~20 years back when a friend gave it to me. It doesn't sound like this other book will be "a good fit" for me. I'll hold off on comments about author David Fischer pandering to the racial hustlers and white cucks and cowards until after I read the review though. (That didn't count!)Replies: @Dieter Kief
OT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/06/14/russia-ukraine-war-fuelling-us-tampon-shortage/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-tampon-shortage-prices-menstrual-products
My emboldening
Journalist is one Victoria Bekiempis.
Who cares? Blacks have worn out their welcome. White Progs already don’t want to live around them, as shown by their real estate choices. What happens when the dollar collapses, make work white collar jobs go away like the blue collar jobs did a generation ago, and buying segregation becomes much more difficult?
Afro-Saxon Roots would have been a snappier title.
Maybe get a sympathetic Jewish coauthor to cover that flank. If Stephen Miller exists, you can find *someone*.Replies: @J.Ross
In fact when Gavin McInnes wanted to rebut the idea that blacks are homogeneous he related archetypes representing New York’s five buroughs. One was supposed to be distinct because they “always had a hustle.”
—–
I’m disappointed to be confirmed in my suspicions (you can’t do a black Albion’s Seed for several good reasons) but I’ll still probably read it for the anecdotes.
I envy the black man's ability, to sow fear nd loathing in the hearts of the white proletariat. The negro is scaremongeering everybody simply for being a negro, while I have to try real hard to achieve the same effect. Maybe it would have been better, if I had been born as a negro myself. I imagine that I would have been a rather tall one (well above average) - and a rather scary negro, who would have pressed his huge loins in streetcars against the wilting hips of elderly white ladies.
(A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, published 1980)Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @SFG
Hmmm, Dieter, that title, A Confederacy of Dunces sounds close to P.J. O’Rourke’s title A Parliament of Whores! This John Toole was first by a decade or so.
OK, that was neither here not there, but I will read your Takimag column after breakfast, Steve. Though it was perhaps too long, I liked Albion’s Seed, which I read ~20 years back when a friend gave it to me. It doesn’t sound like this other book will be “a good fit” for me. I’ll hold off on comments about author David Fischer pandering to the racial hustlers and white cucks and cowards until after I read the review though. (That didn’t count!)
John Kennedy Toole preceded P. J. O'Rourke even more than five years, because the Confederacy of Dunces, published in 1980, had been finished in 1964 (!). Toole got impatient and unhappy while trying to get the book printed, which he never achieved (his mother did with the help of Walker Percy - eleven years after John Kennedy Toole's death in 1969...). The finally very fat, very confused (paranoid not least) and unhappy writer took his life with the help of his baby blue Chevy Chevelle near the Mississippi river at Biloxi.Replies: @Meretricious, @S. Anonyia
“Albion’s Seed” is a very overrated book. I don’t get why would anyone take it too seriously. True, it traces British American regional cultures & ways of life back to parts of Britain, but it is what any informed man (not just a historian) already knew. Nothing serious about early “other” settlers, nor interactions with them.
Probaly this work on blacks is even worse.
It seems that mediocrity is triumphant, because all non-fiction books I’ve seen in the past 10-20 years, trumped up as something “revealing” or “mind boggling” or “erudite”… are, give or take – shallow.
Three other examples of superficiality
The world is getting dumber, that is.
I don't always agree with your point of view, but I think you're spot-on with this post.To be honest, I always thought that Albion's Seed sounded more like the title of an Orson Scott Card book than a work of American history. It is, as you say, extremely overrated.
But as to why it's taken seriously, the general idea around the iSteve blog seems to be that white Americans of a White Identitarian bent seek to claim historical and cultural continuity with the Albion immigrant waves as a way to forge a contemporary group identity and bolster their claims to political preference in these lands.
I think it's doubtful that such a thing is even possible anymore, but quite apart from that, it certainly isn't what anybody is actually doing. Do any Americans really think of themselves as English colonists these days? No, that identity is dead and gone. And do the Alt-White type around here actually maintain any sort of continuity with the beliefs of their ancestors? It seems not. Their ancestors were Christian, but the Alt-White tends to laugh at Christianity and glom onto the shallow, unmetaphysical metaphysics of Darwin and Galton. And then there is always the paradox that progressivism was advanced every step of the way by Albionic white men. It was white abolitionists who freed the slaves, white reformers who expanded the franchise to include women, and white judges and legislators who implemented the policies of the Civil Rights era. The Alt-White wants to claim historical continuity with a group of ancestors while at the same time eschewing the beliefs that their ancestors really did hold. They would find support for their stated goals if they turned towards Traditional Christianity (i.e pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism), but there is little strain of that in post-Reformation English history, and almost none in America.
Albion doesn't provide much to hang an identity on. It was always a protest movement made up of people who were leaving an earlier identity.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
And, just yesterday, I was in the oldest continuously occupied house in English-speaking North America.
This was all due to Albion’s Seed and my wife’s comments as I read it. These historical marvels belonged to her family descended from two brothers who emigrated from Kent on the great ship Hercules in 1634.
The notion that any informed person knew the substance of Albion’s Seed is a tautological dismissal. Albion’s Seed multiplied the number of informed people by a thousand times.
I’ve never heard of isolated pockets of Pygmies before. However, the study of Melungeons in Tennessee and Kentucky is interesting. These tri-racial isolates were often classified as “mulattoes” or “Portuguese” by early census takers. They appear to have migrated away from “Cavalier” areas of Virginia and the Carolinas to isolated “Pioneer” areas of Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. Some descendants have reportedly tested as partially Angolan.
(Besides that he plays a mean banjo, I mean.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFutge4xn3w
http://melungeon.org/2016/10/14/american-triracial-isolates-by-calvin-beale-1957-article/
There are these isolates all over the South and only in Louisiana do they admit to their partial African ancestry (Creoles). In my area their MO is to claim to be Native Americans.Replies: @Steve Sailer
I have always been sympathetic to blacks who struggle with the lack of genuine connection to their ancestral homelands – on both of my parents sides we are recent enough arrivals that we have retained small traditions from our countries of origins, plus I have been able to visit some of these places as well. Although as far is known my ancestors were no one of consequence, most are from nations that have an impactful history, and I’ll admit to taking pride in that.
American blacks have none of that, and their history dating back for centuries and their origins in Africa is being on the losing end of things, constantly. Even more tragic is that in the mid-20th century when they had rough parity with whites in terms of labor force participation, marriage, etc. and political momentum to address legal discrimination, it was all undone by political sponsors who arrived at the conclusion blacks should abandon respectability politics and the cultural guardrails that came with it along with a multi-decade collapse in domestic manufacturing jobs that provided decent wages for non-college laborers.
What has emerged is a culture that has produced mass dysfunction across a broad spectrum and is reduced to issuing demands for special rights and recognition based on real or perceived past wrongs rather than actual achievement – any no promise that this arrangement ever will or should change.
Here in Close-In Suburb, my Goodwhite (and Goodasian) neighbors go to great lengths to avoid encountering Badthoughts, such as the ones you eloquently expressed.
Reality seeping in around the edges can be measured by the slowly declining count of [Only] Black Lives Matter lawn signs in my neighborhood, as St. Floyd's legacy continues to bear its fruit.Replies: @Arclight
I get it - they’re surrounded by intellectually superior races trying to tell them what to do and how to live their lives. That would annoy me to no end too. But beyond that I’m out of sympathy. As Mohamed Ali quipped after visiting an Africa free of White people and White civilization, “thank God my granddaddy got on that boat”
You want a smart black girl or fellow
who’s full-blooded black, not high yellow?
The smartest of Negros
are known as the Igbos;
they come from Biafra*.
*Not Jello!
I read your piece. It could have been summarized as: “There’s no “there” there”.
I was hoping for examples of exceptions to:
As has been mentioned here on several occasions over the years, the primary identity of blacks in America is “not White”, a negative identity, not a positive one.
Of note is that the Quakers were traditionally regarded as exceptionally tolerant, particularly of other religious sects which were generally disfavored.
So now in Southeastern Pennsylvania (which was William Penn’s and the Quakers’ original haunt) there are plenty of “Friends” organizations and schools and (largely repurposed) Meetinghouses, but a relatively few remaining Quakers. In the 1960s Civil Rights era the Quaker remnant (wealthy due to having held farmland real estate which later became inner ring suburbs) became rather meddlesome in the affairs of lower class white ethnics (mainly Roman Catholics) by getting involved in coerced integration of neighborhoods, schools, etc. There’s a lesson here about excessive tolerance and declining demographics.
Sound familiar?
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE OF THESE LIES
ABOUT RECKLESS SPENDING
WE’RE CHANGING PEOPLE’S LIVES!
“In the first half of the 17th century, about 20,000 Puritans moved to New England to found a progressive utopia where everything not forbidden was mandatory.”
“In the middle of the 17th century, while the leftist Puritans were temporarily on top in English politics, rightist Cavaliers migrated from England to Virginia to more or less reproduce the English class structure in their own conservative utopia.”
Steve, you got the order of settlement wrong right off the bat. Virginia was settled before New England. America was not founded by Pilgrims. There was a functioning House of Burgesses in Virginia before the Pilgrims even arrived.
You'll be complaining next about the elevation of the Thanksgiving yarn into American pseudo-history. Just you remember who won the Civil War.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/1b/12/7c/d1/roger-conant-statue.jpg?w=800&h=800&s=1
I have to disagree – American blacks are among the oldest Americans. They had a unique constellation of well-developed regional cultures and folkways in the Tidewater, Lowland and Deep South of the United States. e.g., Clarence Thomas’s first language was Gullah.
It’s strange, but the 20th Century immigrant culture was sort of grafted on to American blacks and it doesn’t really fit. An Appalachian Scots-Irish is no more European than a black American rooted in the Lowland South is African. They’re both very remote in time and experience from their mother Continents and are now quintessentially American.
I think it was the social engineering of the Great Migration that caused a dislocation of blacks from their rooted cultures and folkways, which in turn left them susceptible to a kind of ethnic vandalism which taught them that they’re alien Africans in a foreign land, and that they’re missing something if they don’t have living memory of African ancestors like, say, much more recent Italian-Americans who knew grandpop Fiorello from Calabria who immigrated to Brooklyn in the early 1900s or something. Obviously there is a politically useful valence to making blacks resentful and eternally dyspeptic at being in America rather than Africa, despite being the world’s most fortunate and prosperous persons of Subsaharan African descent.
You describe the sociology and economics (and thus politics) of Rust Belt City to a T.
Here in Close-In Suburb, my Goodwhite (and Goodasian) neighbors go to great lengths to avoid encountering Badthoughts, such as the ones you eloquently expressed.
Reality seeping in around the edges can be measured by the slowly declining count of [Only] Black Lives Matter lawn signs in my neighborhood, as St. Floyd’s legacy continues to bear its fruit.
But the tell about what's in most people's hearts is public school enrollment. Overall the city is roughly half white and my school district is over 60% white, but whites represent less than 20% of students citywide and about 25% in my area. Some of the public schools have some pretty specific programming that attract students who would otherwise maybe go private but the overwhelming majority of white parents of all stripes will do just about anything to keep their kids out of public schools.
I was surprised you associated the Bantu expansion with east Africa. I tend to associate the east with Nilotic languages instead.
Just finished reading “Mayflower” by Nathaniel Philbrick. The Pilgrims barely survived their first year in Plymouth, losing about 50%. They managed to hang on and in a few years owned alot of land and were warring regularly with the Indians.
A waste of Fischer’s time and talents.
Phooey! Phoney baloney!
It's impressive that such a codger can manage to write a history; it's sad that the effort should be so ill-justified. I dare say he meant well.Replies: @Rapparee
OK, that was neither here not there, but I will read your Takimag column after breakfast, Steve. Though it was perhaps too long, I liked Albion's Seed, which I read ~20 years back when a friend gave it to me. It doesn't sound like this other book will be "a good fit" for me. I'll hold off on comments about author David Fischer pandering to the racial hustlers and white cucks and cowards until after I read the review though. (That didn't count!)Replies: @Dieter Kief
There is indeed a metaphor/ metonymy overlap to be spotted here, Mod. – Strange, but this observation never entered my mind even though I know both books.
John Kennedy Toole preceded P. J. O’Rourke even more than five years, because the Confederacy of Dunces, published in 1980, had been finished in 1964 (!). Toole got impatient and unhappy while trying to get the book printed, which he never achieved (his mother did with the help of Walker Percy – eleven years after John Kennedy Toole’s death in 1969…). The finally very fat, very confused (paranoid not least) and unhappy writer took his life with the help of his baby blue Chevy Chevelle near the Mississippi river at Biloxi.
After reading Washington’s Crossing, I was a big fan of Dave Fischer. The book is an all-time classic and a must read for early American history. I took a shot at Albion’s Seed and did not get too far because it is soooo boring. Next I tried Paul Revere’s Ride which is great, but not as stunning as Washington’s Crossing. He wrote the best ever narrative of the “Shots heard around the world” at Lexington and Concord. Outstanding and detailed military history of what you could describe as a couple of skirmishes – but sometimes a small battle shakes up the world. And those two scrapes certainly did that.
So my point is this – Fischer is at his best writing American Military History. Circling back to the topic at hand – Blacks did not matter in American military history until the aggressive policy of affirmative action in the 1960’s. So Fischer has nothing to write about that plays to his best strength. Also, somebody has to say it: At age 86 his energy level is low, so who is doing the real work here. Be careful with that one!
John Kennedy Toole preceded P. J. O'Rourke even more than five years, because the Confederacy of Dunces, published in 1980, had been finished in 1964 (!). Toole got impatient and unhappy while trying to get the book printed, which he never achieved (his mother did with the help of Walker Percy - eleven years after John Kennedy Toole's death in 1969...). The finally very fat, very confused (paranoid not least) and unhappy writer took his life with the help of his baby blue Chevy Chevelle near the Mississippi river at Biloxi.Replies: @Meretricious, @S. Anonyia
OT but ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ as a title is so much more clever than ‘A Parliament of Whores’–on so many levels. And there’s no question that the inferior writer stole the idea for Whores
John Kennedy Toole preceded P. J. O'Rourke even more than five years, because the Confederacy of Dunces, published in 1980, had been finished in 1964 (!). Toole got impatient and unhappy while trying to get the book printed, which he never achieved (his mother did with the help of Walker Percy - eleven years after John Kennedy Toole's death in 1969...). The finally very fat, very confused (paranoid not least) and unhappy writer took his life with the help of his baby blue Chevy Chevelle near the Mississippi river at Biloxi.Replies: @Meretricious, @S. Anonyia
Small quibble- Biloxi is nowhere near the Mississippi river, Biloxi sits on a bay & the Mississippi Sound, not really any rivers nearby. The Mississippi runs through New Orleans 80-90 miles to the West.
Hilarious to Americans not from the Appalachian region.
The funniest part of Hackett’s book perhaps is a quotation from a contemporary of Toqueville who travelled through Appalachia and reported the people there eat the “stuff that we feed to the hogs”.
There are errors in Hackett’s book which are so egregious that it is clear that his research was sloppy and done with tunnel vision to confirm his prejudices. I will be kind and say that Hackett is a jackass. A few very good bits. A comparison would be an NFL player who has as many fumbles lost as spectacular touchdowns. It is not to your credit if you find Albion’s Seed a good book.
The Beverly Hillbillies television show is much higher quality and similarly accurate.
The title of Mr. Hackett’s book has error #1: African Founders “Founders”? Really? What exactly did they found? Even the NAACP wasn’t founded by them. They didn’t really found anything, other than finding stuff that was already here that they could take part in.
I appreciate the great review. To me your basic points, that Mr. Hackett a) really didn’t have too many actual diverse groups of Africans to analyze, b) he could not get himself to say anything that could be interpreted as “not nice” about Africans in America, and c) he turned the book into a series of anecdotes of tough and smart black guys (I’m sure there have been plenty) instead, have me sure I won’t be reading this one.
That aside, I just plain have this fatigue with the blackety-black stuff. I’m done with it. The pissing and moaning stops at the last layer of your face mask. OK, well, if not that, before it gets to my ears. It’s been entirely too much already.
Lastly:
OK, that’s one theory. However, there is also the geographic factor. Scandinavians, for example, and Norwegians even more specifically, like the Pacific NW coast, as it would have reminded them very much of home. The graveyards in Seattle still have loads of gravestones with those type names, and there are still plenty of descendants among the rest of the riff-raff out there. (There was this old bartender named Helmur.)
Now - I want nothing to do with blacks, taxes, or poverty programs. My race solution is rule of law and deportation of criminals.
A couple of columns ago, Henry Louis Gates was quoted as saying “I’m a pan-African person, so my definition of the Black experience has always included the entire Black diaspora.”
Most North Africans – Arabs, Berbers, ancient Egyptians, and Alexandrian Greeks and Jews – are not black, and are part of neither Gates’ “Black experience” nor pan-Africanism (except when blacks want to claim credit for these groups’ achievements). Pan-Africanism appears to mean pan-sub-Saharanism (including the diaspora).
It often seems even more specific – it is pan-Bantuism.
Here in Close-In Suburb, my Goodwhite (and Goodasian) neighbors go to great lengths to avoid encountering Badthoughts, such as the ones you eloquently expressed.
Reality seeping in around the edges can be measured by the slowly declining count of [Only] Black Lives Matter lawn signs in my neighborhood, as St. Floyd's legacy continues to bear its fruit.Replies: @Arclight
Obviously a very common theme, as I also live in a large Rust Belt city and grew up in one. There are still a decent number of Republicans/not Democrats in my neighborhood (in the city but suburban in character, upper middle class) so although “we believe” yard signs and pride flags can be spotted, it’s probably 1 in 10, but that number increases the closer you get to downtown, excepting the stretch that is actually inhabited by people of diversity.
But the tell about what’s in most people’s hearts is public school enrollment. Overall the city is roughly half white and my school district is over 60% white, but whites represent less than 20% of students citywide and about 25% in my area. Some of the public schools have some pretty specific programming that attract students who would otherwise maybe go private but the overwhelming majority of white parents of all stripes will do just about anything to keep their kids out of public schools.
I envy the black man's ability, to sow fear nd loathing in the hearts of the white proletariat. The negro is scaremongeering everybody simply for being a negro, while I have to try real hard to achieve the same effect. Maybe it would have been better, if I had been born as a negro myself. I imagine that I would have been a rather tall one (well above average) - and a rather scary negro, who would have pressed his huge loins in streetcars against the wilting hips of elderly white ladies.
(A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, published 1980)Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @SFG
Is that Ignatius Reilly talking, though? He’s a 30-year-old morbidly obese bachelor who lives with his mom and not a reliable narrator at all (though with the medieval Catholic obsession he actually sounds kinda like some alt right types, half a century early).
She was under the clear impression her son was some kind of genius from early on (age five at least), which might have made her overprotective - or have added to her willingness to (over)protect him... - and that might well have been part of John Kennedy Toole's deadly fate***.
Walker Percy complained repeatedly to his wife about her in the process. -
It took Walker Percy a while before he got the impression, that the fat insisting old half-widow with the genius fixation actually - did have a point with regard to the comical/ absurd/satirical new-orleansian novel she had tried very hard indeed to make him read and promote!
Ignatius Reilly and the author both leaned towards Boethius' - if not humorous than at least wise worldview out of the dilemma, their existence - mirrored.
What sets both men so to speak apart from maany a soul in the alt-right is their sense of humor and - their willingness to make concessions (= to accept that the rage they felt inside did not only stem from - the others... - the left/the government/ the system...).
John F. Kennedy's death seems to have hit him midships (in his heart) - for whatever reason. ***
Thologian/ philosopher Boehtius (5th century) was one of the rare classical figures in Western history, who somehow got the nature of existential paradoxes (a predecessor of Montaigne's idea of the fluctuation or reality and his and the French Moralists' dry clarity).******
****** It's a bit disappointing that not that many literary scientists seem to care. - But here is at least one I could find - and he shares my astonishment about the scholarly - ignorance (= heheh: the scholarly Confederacy of the Dunces - with regard to the Confederacy of the Dunces - full fat luminous and glitteringly roundabout of circles - - -within a circle***** ...).
: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+refutation+of+Robert+Byrne%3a+John+Kennedy+Toole%27s+a+confederacy+of...-a0296836107Replies: @James J. O'Meara
Yes, your Taki article (full version of the Unz piece above) is well worth reading.
While the recent PBS series about “discovering your roots” does feature some prominent blacks, in general there isn’t much popular discussion of the African roots of American blacks.
At some future time when Woke mania eventually fades (or total ignorant darkness rules) there may be some comprehensive DNA and geographic study of this subject.
Africans are said to be more genetically diverse than other races, but in America the somewhat random geographic spread of Africans under slavery (and later, more slowly after slavery) still would hold clues about behavior as the Taki article discusses.
We hardly quibble about the differences between Irish, French and Greeks, for instance, even in America decades after immigration. So why not Africans? Of course their circumstances didn’t generally permit much transmission of original tribal culture other than in some elements of dress and cuisine. Still temperament and cultural habits persist to some degree with Europeans long after immigration to America, so why not Africans? We eat a lot of Italian food, but not much Swedish.
It is highly likely that American blacks descend from only a small subset of African populations, other than small numbers of recent legal immigrants. It would be good to know more about that.
I appreciate the great review. To me your basic points, that Mr. Hackett a) really didn't have too many actual diverse groups of Africans to analyze, b) he could not get himself to say anything that could be interpreted as "not nice" about Africans in America, and c) he turned the book into a series of anecdotes of tough and smart black guys (I'm sure there have been plenty) instead, have me sure I won't be reading this one.
That aside, I just plain have this fatigue with the blackety-black stuff. I'm done with it. The pissing and moaning stops at the last layer of your face mask. OK, well, if not that, before it gets to my ears. It's been entirely too much already.
Lastly:OK, that's one theory. However, there is also the geographic factor. Scandinavians, for example, and Norwegians even more specifically, like the Pacific NW coast, as it would have reminded them very much of home. The graveyards in Seattle still have loads of gravestones with those type names, and there are still plenty of descendants among the rest of the riff-raff out there. (There was this old bartender named Helmur.)Replies: @70sTarheel, @rebel yell
Agree about the geographic factor. This is especially true irt Scots-Irish. The Appalachians and the Scottish Highlands are part of the same mountain range-the Central Pangean Mountains.
The Caribbean Islands have always seemed to me proof of both black diversity (Talented Tenth, simple stupid bureaucrat middle class, Violent aggressive bottom 20 %) and also the fact that America has been awesome to blacks.
American blacks could migrate en masse to these islands, which are black dominated and largely black-run, where the weather is suited to them and where their culture dominates, and yet they don’t do so.
Besides a brief minor migration to Liberia in Africa (which many second generation blacks quickly ran back to America from), American blacks have shunned “back to Africa.” Most will argue its because 19th and 20th century “colonialism” ruined them.
Yet the Caribbean offered something closer and fresher and untouched by the Scramble for Africa, and yet blacks from the Caribbean from it to America as much as they can.
I would think blacks would rather love being the biggest, richest, smartest Big Man in a small island. But they’d rather “suffer” under “racism” in America.
During his presidency in the 1820s he was very big on getting Black Americans to come to his country. Even as far back then, Black Americans were in a class among themselves as far as skills in the African diaspora. Boyer sent agents to NYC and Philly to sell Blacks there to migrate to Haiti. Didn’t have much luck in NYC but had some success in Philly. About a hundred or so families eventually migrated to Haiti. They hated it. Labor terms weren’t clear, language was different, local Haitians resented them. Most returned to the USA less than a year later. A few stayed on there’s a small community that still exists in the Dominican Republic (Boyer had invaded and occupied DR during his presidency). They’ve mostly blended in local DR family but a few speak in a 19th century Philly accent, maintain Protestant faith and have English surnames.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/travel/preserving-black-american-history-through-song-in-the-dominican-republic.html
While the recent PBS series about "discovering your roots" does feature some prominent blacks, in general there isn't much popular discussion of the African roots of American blacks.
At some future time when Woke mania eventually fades (or total ignorant darkness rules) there may be some comprehensive DNA and geographic study of this subject.
Africans are said to be more genetically diverse than other races, but in America the somewhat random geographic spread of Africans under slavery (and later, more slowly after slavery) still would hold clues about behavior as the Taki article discusses.
We hardly quibble about the differences between Irish, French and Greeks, for instance, even in America decades after immigration. So why not Africans? Of course their circumstances didn't generally permit much transmission of original tribal culture other than in some elements of dress and cuisine. Still temperament and cultural habits persist to some degree with Europeans long after immigration to America, so why not Africans? We eat a lot of Italian food, but not much Swedish.
It is highly likely that American blacks descend from only a small subset of African populations, other than small numbers of recent legal immigrants. It would be good to know more about that.Replies: @BB753
It would also be interesting to find out what kind of Albion’s seed did predominantly impregnate the female slaves, since blacks are about a quarter white on average.
To be clear, we are talking about a tiny fraction of black ancestry here (usually in the very low single digit percentage).Replies: @BB753, @Jenner Ickham Errican
If I’m not mistaken, the original homeland of the Bantu was in Equatorial Africa and toward the western half of the continent.
I suspect it’s a fool’s errand to attempt to attribute features of black American society generally or of local communities of blacks to any African culture. Ditto in assessing the Caribbean islands.
I’ve read that the Scots in Appalachia actually moved to the mountains to escape the taxation of their alcohol. Hence the origins of moonshine/corn liquor.
The fringes of white American settlement produced alcohol from their grain because it was too expensive to move the grain itself to major grain markets.
They obviously didn’t like being taxed, but the alcohol was produced because of their isolation, not because of taxes. Taxes in general were very low in early America, and mostly fell on imports. Selling Western land also provided a large source of federal revenue that allowed taxes to be very low.
The vast number and bloody nature of the settler-Indian wars between 1620 and 1770 is something that has been forgotten by a lot of Americans.
Imagine being a lone outpost of a few hundred religious people, surrounded by foreboding wilderness, and in the middle of the night painted savages (of an entirely different race than you, making them seem even weirder and scarier) wielding axes and spears rush in, murder you, burn your houses to the ground, and take the rest off to be tortured, raped, and murdered/enslaved. With no help to call on.
Terrifying. And a big reason why later colonists resented the British heavy hand following the French-and-Indian war—“Where were you guys when my family was getting scalped and tortured for the last 150 years?”
These wars took a heavy psychological toll, especially in New England. The Puritans were bitter callous flinty folk partly because they were always on edge about Indian attacks. Some historians think that Salem Witch Trials were partially caused by mass PTSD due to a recent bloody war in King Phillip’s War.
https://infogalactic.com/info/King_Philip%27s_War
Besides disease and higher civilizational organization, about the only other thing that allowed Europeans to win was the fact that Indian tribes were more interested in killing off other Indian tribes than colonists, and so would ally with colonists against each other. Pan-racialism is a joke.
I’ve made it a minor hobby to start getting up on old pre-1776 Indian wars and legends. King Phillip (an Indian) is a very interesting character.
*Imagine an America in which, instead of blacks, 13% of the population is, say, Japanese. Race would be far less relevant and, to the extent there is contention, it would be over assimilation, culture, etc.Replies: @Corn, @R.G. Camara, @SFG, @J.Ross
Puritan descendants seem to embrace BLM, but during g the Plains Indian wars they did not embrace PILM
If 50% of Puritans died during the first few winters, then that would make for some severe Darwinian selection ....but do we see advantages in later stock of Puritans?
It's perhaps just a trick imposed by time and preservation of records, but I have more ancestors who were directly involved in King Philip's War (as militia soldiers, political leaders, or settlers attacked in their homes) than in any other American conflict, the Civil War not excepted.
The Colony was at least half NA. 6500 Praying Indians and 6500 English with 400 Pilgrims and 2000 Narrangassets on the sidelines. The Whampanoags numbered 14000 with similar weapons and more casual fightin experience.
After the war, relations with the NAs never recovered.
The quote is from a scene in which Ignatius Reilly starts to dance in the rock’n’roll manner, even though he clearly does not like it. So – yes, Ignatius Reilly monologuing. But the narrator and the author share a lot of experiences/ real life parallels (such as the dominating mother – the one who did not rest (over more than ten years after John Kennedy Toole’s death) until the manuscript was finally in print.
She was under the clear impression her son was some kind of genius from early on (age five at least), which might have made her overprotective – or have added to her willingness to (over)protect him… – and that might well have been part of John Kennedy Toole’s deadly fate***.
Walker Percy complained repeatedly to his wife about her in the process. –
It took Walker Percy a while before he got the impression, that the fat insisting old half-widow with the genius fixation actually – did have a point with regard to the comical/ absurd/satirical new-orleansian novel she had tried very hard indeed to make him read and promote!
Ignatius Reilly and the author both leaned towards Boethius’ – if not humorous than at least wise worldview out of the dilemma, their existence – mirrored.
What sets both men so to speak apart from maany a soul in the alt-right is their sense of humor and – their willingness to make concessions (= to accept that the rage they felt inside did not only stem from – the others… – the left/the government/ the system…).
John F. Kennedy’s death seems to have hit him midships (in his heart) – for whatever reason. ***
Thologian/ philosopher Boehtius (5th century) was one of the rare classical figures in Western history, who somehow got the nature of existential paradoxes (a predecessor of Montaigne’s idea of the fluctuation or reality and his and the French Moralists’ dry clarity).******
****** It’s a bit disappointing that not that many literary scientists seem to care. – But here is at least one I could find – and he shares my astonishment about the scholarly – ignorance (= heheh: the scholarly Confederacy of the Dunces – with regard to the Confederacy of the Dunces – full fat luminous and glitteringly roundabout of circles – – -within a circle***** …).
: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+refutation+of+Robert+Byrne%3a+John+Kennedy+Toole%27s+a+confederacy+of…-a0296836107
I've noted the "Ignatius Reilly" type among the alt-right many times in the past. Actually, I knew two "conservative" guys, about ten years apart, who were almost carbon copies of IR, at least in terms of their weight and proudly "eccentric" ideas and mannerisms. Someone I've forgotten described a related type, basing themselves on G. K. Chesterton, with walrus moustaches filled with pub-fare cheese and cracker crumbs that would spew out as they pounded the table or bar top, shouting they'd "stand for no damn'd nonsense!"
For some reason they're usually Catholic, although those guys I knew were a Mormon (who loved Led Zeppelin and taught me the iSteve point that musical taste is determined by what was on the radio when you were 13) and a Jew (the first "neocon" I ever met). The reason is obvious, the Catholic idea that all our problems stem from deviating from the Church's various teachings (what IR calls "insufficient theology and geometry). Today, they're Trad Caths, like E. Michael Jones or Nick Fuentes, pounding the table and demanding a return to good, sound Throne and Altar systems of government.
But it's broader than that, on the alt-right; it's all those guys who thought our Current Problems could only be solved by -- surprise! -- the application, good and hard, of their favorite hobby horse, usually some moribund European beardo-weirdo, like Nietzsche (remember how Spencer would quote him?) Dugin, Evola, Heidegger, etc. Anything but, you know, sitting down and think up a way of solving the problems that 300 million ordinary folks would go along with; because it's not about solving the problem of Jewish control or racial violence, it's about never letting a crisis go to waste, if you can use it to talk about your hobbyhorse.
Not these other guys, though. The serious application of some Olde Europe school of thought to problems in 21st century America requires a total lack of self-awareness or of a sense of humor (the two go together). It's like a heavy metal band adding umlauts to their name (The interviews in Spinal Tap could be any number of alt-right podcasts).
Think of Spencer's monologue on his favorite hamburger: buffoon, not clown. "What's so funny?" Steve Bannon still tries to work both the Dugin and Catholic angles, despite the former being an ex-Satanist and Third Rome fanatic. He actually has a pretty good sense of humor, though.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Dieter Kief, @Emil Nikola Richard
The Fulani actually have quite a decent cut of ‘relatively recent’ , (ie in the last few thousand years), European autosomal DNA.
Likely this was inherited from Natufian like peoples in North Africa who formed a conquering, founding elite, cf the Aryan invasion of India.
A strange fact is that during the age of British colonialism in what is now Nigeria, British colonial authorities preferred dealing with the northern, Muslim tribes of Nigeria whom they viewed as honorable and trustworthy, unlike the tribes from the south.
Even more bizarrely, a DNA marker found in iconically Saharan dark skinned desert raiders, ultimately had its origin amongst the men who braved the frozen Russian steppes for a living, and who had 'skins as white as snow'!Replies: @John Milton's Ghost
It is true that on the whole the northern tribes of Nigeria were more Muslim than pagan, but they also tended to be speakers of Nilo-Saharan or Afro-Asiatic languages. These language families are not Bantu, and indicate origins north or east of the Sahara. The language difference also indicates a genetic difference on some level (even if, phenotypically, it isn't obvious to an outside observer).
Nineteenth century immigrants from Europe were attracted by available land and jobs. The industrializing North and Midwest had plenty of both, the South did not. Immigrants tended to acquire the ideological coloration of their American neighbors. An excellent example is the Massachusetts Irish, a Catholic group that has become liberal and de facto anti-Catholic (e.g., the Kennedys), due to ideological contamination from their liberal Yankee neighbors. During the civil war, Northern Catholics in general supported the North and Southern Catholics the Confederacy. Philosophical or theological principles were trumped by the desire to conform to the community. I think this is a more important factor than any cultural predisposition on the part of the immigrants.
Predominantly East Coast “old stock” whites, who are themselves a tiny bit black on average, especially compared to, say, Midwestern whites. Those whites with German and Scandinavian ancestries tend have genes from the later arrivals from Europe and tend not to be even tiny bit black at all. The same goes for the later Irish arrivals as well, but many of them intermixed eventually with the old stock whites and so tend to have a tad bit more black ancestry than the Midwestern Germans and Scandinavians.
To be clear, we are talking about a tiny fraction of black ancestry here (usually in the very low single digit percentage).
Likely this was inherited from Natufian like peoples in North Africa who formed a conquering, founding elite, cf the Aryan invasion of India.
A strange fact is that during the age of British colonialism in what is now Nigeria, British colonial authorities preferred dealing with the northern, Muslim tribes of Nigeria whom they viewed as honorable and trustworthy, unlike the tribes from the south.Replies: @Anonymous, @John Milton's Ghost
Certain black African herder/warrior tribes have quite a high percentage of the R1b y DNA haplotype, which is quintessentially European, in fact while we are on the subject of ‘Albion’s Seed’, this haplotype is carried by the bulk of British men.
Even more bizarrely, a DNA marker found in iconically Saharan dark skinned desert raiders, ultimately had its origin amongst the men who braved the frozen Russian steppes for a living, and who had ‘skins as white as snow’!
The Khoi-San and Pygmy groups are also interesting, and of course are the basis of the claim that Africa is so diverse. Razib Khan has noted something to the effect that two San Bushman can be more genetically different from each other than any other two people in the world. Further, any two non-sub-Saharan Africans (including Swedes and Filipinos, e.g.) are closer to each other than they are to any sub-Saharan African.
The funniest part of Hackett's book perhaps is a quotation from a contemporary of Toqueville who travelled through Appalachia and reported the people there eat the "stuff that we feed to the hogs".
There are errors in Hackett's book which are so egregious that it is clear that his research was sloppy and done with tunnel vision to confirm his prejudices. I will be kind and say that Hackett is a jackass. A few very good bits. A comparison would be an NFL player who has as many fumbles lost as spectacular touchdowns. It is not to your credit if you find Albion's Seed a good book.
The Beverly Hillbillies television show is much higher quality and similarly accurate.Replies: @Bill Jones, @Crawfurdmuir
Stolen from the Prodigal Son parable who “Would fain have filled his belly with the husks the swine did eat”. As I recall the KJV has it.
The modern American notion of Indians tends to be formed mostly from the Westerns that feature nomadic and semi-nomadic Indians on horseback in the West and the Southwest. Most Americans don’t know that there was significant warfare between the New England colonial settlers and the likes of the Wampanoag (or in the upper South the Powhatans) who were semi-sedentary and grew crops (usually tended by women).
East Coast Indians were easier to defeat, precisely because they were not nomadic. Destruction of villages and gardens, combined with the diseases brought by the colonials, wreaked havoc on their demographics.
In much of the world and pre-modern America, yes. Race has become highly salient in the U.S., because of the stark white-black divide.* As I often caution, in much of the rest of the world, national and ethnic differences are far more salient.
*Imagine an America in which, instead of blacks, 13% of the population is, say, Japanese. Race would be far less relevant and, to the extent there is contention, it would be over assimilation, culture, etc.
Most Americans would probably give you a blank look if you mentioned it today.Replies: @Director95
WTF, I now love public transportation, and walking around cities at night.
How about that Deliverance guy from Rabun County, Georgia. What’s his deal?
(Besides that he plays a mean banjo, I mean.)
My Norwegian grandfather disdained corn (maize) as pig food, which it is (or was) in Europe.
the most interesting question is whether the people who made the journey across the ocean were less intelligent on average than the people who sold them.
i maintain my hypothesis that yes they were, by 5 wechsler points or more. the people doing the selling were smarter. the people doing the sailing were less smart.
even 400 years, africa could not escape the consequences of class.
Bill, I can’t quote chapter and verse, but I remember something about that. From China I know that during the recovery from the Cultural Revolution madness – even into the early 1980s, the Chinese people had ration cards that they had to use for corn shipped from America. (Of course, they would have preferred rice.) This corn was feed corn too. Communists can’t be choosers, or something like that …
Always assumed that American blacks, via their inability to assmilate or educate, their non-existent impulse control and too-existent tendency to violence, were bottom of genetic barrel, negro-wise. Can someone tell me if new Fincher book advances or diminishes that interpretation?
"In the middle of the 17th century, while the leftist Puritans were temporarily on top in English politics, rightist Cavaliers migrated from England to Virginia to more or less reproduce the English class structure in their own conservative utopia."
Steve, you got the order of settlement wrong right off the bat. Virginia was settled before New England. America was not founded by Pilgrims. There was a functioning House of Burgesses in Virginia before the Pilgrims even arrived.Replies: @John Milton's Ghost, @Emil Nikola Richard, @dearieme, @MEH 0910, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Yes Virginia started in 1607, but a demographically-stable society, one that has any claim to cultural continuity, came well after. The Puritan migration was essentially over by 1640, which was when the Cavaliers began to arrive in large enough numbers (and with enough women) to produce new baby Cavaliers. Temporally Virginia was first, but logically and demographically it makes more sense to start with New England.
*Imagine an America in which, instead of blacks, 13% of the population is, say, Japanese. Race would be far less relevant and, to the extent there is contention, it would be over assimilation, culture, etc.Replies: @Corn, @R.G. Camara, @SFG, @J.Ross
When I first read Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? I was shocked to learn that per capita, the bloodiest war in American history is actually King Philip’s War.
Most Americans would probably give you a blank look if you mentioned it today.
That war happened long, long before the silly concept of the Noble Savage took hold in American mythology.
Corn, a few of us still study early American history and do not get our facts from Hollywood cowboy movies.Replies: @R.G. Camara
Likely this was inherited from Natufian like peoples in North Africa who formed a conquering, founding elite, cf the Aryan invasion of India.
A strange fact is that during the age of British colonialism in what is now Nigeria, British colonial authorities preferred dealing with the northern, Muslim tribes of Nigeria whom they viewed as honorable and trustworthy, unlike the tribes from the south.Replies: @Anonymous, @John Milton's Ghost
The Fulani are one of the more interesting outliers in the genomic mapping of African populations, the exception that perhaps proves the rule, as their Y-DNA diverges dramatically from other nearby groups, but their language does align with the Niger-Congo family from which the Bantu group derives.
It is true that on the whole the northern tribes of Nigeria were more Muslim than pagan, but they also tended to be speakers of Nilo-Saharan or Afro-Asiatic languages. These language families are not Bantu, and indicate origins north or east of the Sahara. The language difference also indicates a genetic difference on some level (even if, phenotypically, it isn’t obvious to an outside observer).
"In the middle of the 17th century, while the leftist Puritans were temporarily on top in English politics, rightist Cavaliers migrated from England to Virginia to more or less reproduce the English class structure in their own conservative utopia."
Steve, you got the order of settlement wrong right off the bat. Virginia was settled before New England. America was not founded by Pilgrims. There was a functioning House of Burgesses in Virginia before the Pilgrims even arrived.Replies: @John Milton's Ghost, @Emil Nikola Richard, @dearieme, @MEH 0910, @Jenner Ickham Errican
What was the colony of Virginia vanished long before what was the colony of Massacheusetts. Around 50 or 100 years before. In 1865 it was extinct.
They moved there (or were encouraged to move) because the land east of the Appalachians was already owned and being farmed. And before the industrial revolution cities were trading centers, etc – not places where there were lots of available jobs. So no place else to go but push west.
Moonshine is simply a term for untaxed liquor. Typically but not always made from corn in the past, now almost exclusively made with sugar. Sometimes at the liquor store you will see “moonshine” for sale, but its just corn liquor. Its not moonshine…because its been taxed.
Putting aside the tax status, moonshine is usually:
1. Unaged and therefore clear.
2. Traditionally distilled mainly from corn. (You actually need to add a certain % of malted barley because it contains enzymes that convert the corn starch to sugar - yeast can't eat starch, only sugar).
3. High proof.
Or, in a few words, corn liquor as it comes directly from the still.
You might think that this is the basically same thing as vodka or Everclear but despite being clear has quite a bit of corn taste because vodka is usually distilled more perfectly and filtered .Replies: @William Badwhite
Even more bizarrely, a DNA marker found in iconically Saharan dark skinned desert raiders, ultimately had its origin amongst the men who braved the frozen Russian steppes for a living, and who had 'skins as white as snow'!Replies: @John Milton's Ghost
Yes, interesting stuff. The genomic mapping shows that the most interesting fault lines in Africa appear to occur around the Sahara, which is the northern boundary of the Bantu. Some of the sedentary groups there appear to have traveled from farther afield (the Kanuri, e.g., probably came from the east) and the nomadic tribes like the Fulani picked up anomalous influences from even farther away.
The Khoi-San and Pygmy groups are also interesting, and of course are the basis of the claim that Africa is so diverse. Razib Khan has noted something to the effect that two San Bushman can be more genetically different from each other than any other two people in the world. Further, any two non-sub-Saharan Africans (including Swedes and Filipinos, e.g.) are closer to each other than they are to any sub-Saharan African.
Thx. S. Anonyia! Biloxi Mississippi is in Missisipi, – now I see! – So: John Kennedy Toole took his life near an even greater mass of water – which could have helped him to appraoch eternity (= Dr. Freud’s oceanic feeling) while doing what he (sadly) had found the appropriate thing to do. – The baby-blue Chevy Chevelle he passed away in shines (radiates…) even more plausible in the light of Dr. Freud’s picture of the macro-cosmic harmony (very) early childhood is , according to Dr. Freud, representing – as an integral part of our permanent regressive – – – – desires*.
*Time is an ocean – but it ends at the shore / I may not see you tomorrow (Bob Dylan / Oh Sister/ DESIRE).
Rural NJ also had “triracial isolates.” They are known for albinism and extra fingers according to this article.
http://melungeon.org/2016/10/14/american-triracial-isolates-by-calvin-beale-1957-article/
“ moved to the mountains to escape the taxation of their alcohol”
The fringes of white American settlement produced alcohol from their grain because it was too expensive to move the grain itself to major grain markets.
They obviously didn’t like being taxed, but the alcohol was produced because of their isolation, not because of taxes. Taxes in general were very low in early America, and mostly fell on imports. Selling Western land also provided a large source of federal revenue that allowed taxes to be very low.
*Imagine an America in which, instead of blacks, 13% of the population is, say, Japanese. Race would be far less relevant and, to the extent there is contention, it would be over assimilation, culture, etc.Replies: @Corn, @R.G. Camara, @SFG, @J.Ross
When the KKK was big, while it stated that it worked for “whites”, it was really was Southern- Scots-Irish-Protestants (KKK was big on hating Catholics and Northeast Irish Catholics, hence its later appeal in the 1920s to Northern WASPs elites as a bulkwark against them). It was never about “white power” but rather an ethnic protection service protecting Southern-Scots-Irish-Protestants against blacks, Jews, Catholics, and carpetbagging Yankees.
If blacks were replaced with Japanese in the U.S., the NBA and NFL would get way more boring, but the drop in crime, increase in property value, and intermarriage excitement would more than make up for it.
The newest Mongolian Yokozuna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGyeIfqOO60
Amongst the immense range of Japanese martial arts budō 武道, thousands of schools and styles, there are some very practical self defence skills, like Tankendō 短剣道, kendo with short swords,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8U5zzx3714Replies: @R.G. Camara
"In the middle of the 17th century, while the leftist Puritans were temporarily on top in English politics, rightist Cavaliers migrated from England to Virginia to more or less reproduce the English class structure in their own conservative utopia."
Steve, you got the order of settlement wrong right off the bat. Virginia was settled before New England. America was not founded by Pilgrims. There was a functioning House of Burgesses in Virginia before the Pilgrims even arrived.Replies: @John Milton's Ghost, @Emil Nikola Richard, @dearieme, @MEH 0910, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Oi! Just you remember who won the Civil War.
You’ll be complaining next about the elevation of the Thanksgiving yarn into American pseudo-history. Just you remember who won the Civil War.
And that was advertised in the post-colonic part of his title: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals
Phooey! Phoney baloney!
It’s impressive that such a codger can manage to write a history; it’s sad that the effort should be so ill-justified. I dare say he meant well.
Confederacy of Dunces, although clever given the double meaning of “Confederacy” (the novel is set in New Orleans), was not original to Toole. It is based upon a quote from Jonathan Swift:
How high-achieving are the Igbos really? Ok, they outperform African-Americans, but that’s a low bar. I’m looking here at the 2021 list of national merit scholars from Texas. There are a lot of Nigerians in Houston, but I don’t see any Nigerian names whatsoever among the nearly 100 kids from Houston.
https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.33/22v.863.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/National-Merit-Program-Semifinalists-2022.pdf
I didn’t know it.
Well-you should.
I appreciate the great review. To me your basic points, that Mr. Hackett a) really didn't have too many actual diverse groups of Africans to analyze, b) he could not get himself to say anything that could be interpreted as "not nice" about Africans in America, and c) he turned the book into a series of anecdotes of tough and smart black guys (I'm sure there have been plenty) instead, have me sure I won't be reading this one.
That aside, I just plain have this fatigue with the blackety-black stuff. I'm done with it. The pissing and moaning stops at the last layer of your face mask. OK, well, if not that, before it gets to my ears. It's been entirely too much already.
Lastly:OK, that's one theory. However, there is also the geographic factor. Scandinavians, for example, and Norwegians even more specifically, like the Pacific NW coast, as it would have reminded them very much of home. The graveyards in Seattle still have loads of gravestones with those type names, and there are still plenty of descendants among the rest of the riff-raff out there. (There was this old bartender named Helmur.)Replies: @70sTarheel, @rebel yell
Agree. Forty years ago in my idealistic youth I thought, “Hey, give everyone a fair chance, regardless of race.” I was against affirmative action but was willing to pay taxes to give blacks a “leg up” if it was based on poverty not race.
Now – I want nothing to do with blacks, taxes, or poverty programs. My race solution is rule of law and deportation of criminals.
interesting points that I have not considered at all. But Puritans today have long forgotten the frontier experience whereas The Scotch Irish remain more realistic.
Puritan descendants seem to embrace BLM, but during g the Plains Indian wars they did not embrace PILM
If 50% of Puritans died during the first few winters, then that would make for some severe Darwinian selection ….but do we see advantages in later stock of Puritans?
So now in Southeastern Pennsylvania (which was William Penn's and the Quakers' original haunt) there are plenty of "Friends" organizations and schools and (largely repurposed) Meetinghouses, but a relatively few remaining Quakers. In the 1960s Civil Rights era the Quaker remnant (wealthy due to having held farmland real estate which later became inner ring suburbs) became rather meddlesome in the affairs of lower class white ethnics (mainly Roman Catholics) by getting involved in coerced integration of neighborhoods, schools, etc. There's a lesson here about excessive tolerance and declining demographics.Replies: @rebel yell, @Hibernian
The Quakers were tolerant, but also realistic and therefore hypocrites. They sent new Scotch/Irish immigrants to their western frontier to fight it out with the Indians. When the frontiersmen came back to Philadelphia to request military help the Quaker leaders scolded them for not being nice to the Indians.
Sound familiar?
Here’s an anecdote I’ll pass along without comment. Make of it what you will. I worked with a black man who was born in Texas in the 1930s and migrated to California in the 1950s. He told me that shortly after arriving in California he was having his hair cut at a Barber Shop. The black barber asked if he was from Texas. Surprised my co-worker answered yes and asked how he knew. The barber claimed to be able to tell where black Americans came from based on some characteristic in their hair.
You may be interested in Chief Cornstalk. He led the Shawnee in Lord Dunmore’s War against the Virginia militia. He was later held hostage and subsequently murdered at Fort Randolph in 1777. There still exist some rumours that it was a false flag operation by the British to prevent the Shawnee from going over to the rebel side. Some still claim one or more of Cornstalk’s orphaned children were adopted by the Virginia militia officer Thomas Mastin and raised amongst the whites.
Most Americans would probably give you a blank look if you mentioned it today.Replies: @Director95
The King Philips War was utterly brutal, genocidal and a true existential threat to the whites. The wild Indians of New England practiced white slavery on a large scale, so the settlers gave them no quarter.
That war happened long, long before the silly concept of the Noble Savage took hold in American mythology.
Corn, a few of us still study early American history and do not get our facts from Hollywood cowboy movies.
https://poets.org/poem/vanishing-red
Frost's poem is condemning and attacking on the whites, and mournful for the Indian. Shades of gay Anderson Cooper giggling about his ancestors being murdered by their slaves.
I used to vibe with Frost's holier-than-thou attitude and plaintive tale. After reading about the actual brutality and truth of Indian attacks, while I can't say I'm on the miller's side, I can at least say I understand why he would take pleasure in revenging his ancestral blood on the side that did his family wrong.Replies: @Steve Sailer
When I was in elementary school our school library still had a lot of the old American Heritage books. I believe they were quite good. The illustrations still come to mind. I remember reading about Queen Anne’s War along with the French and Indian War which Washington fought in. Exciting stuff.
What if I were to pay the tax on a jug of moonshine? Would it then not be moonshine anymore? The tax status has nothing to do with the physical attributes of the drink.
Putting aside the tax status, moonshine is usually:
1. Unaged and therefore clear.
2. Traditionally distilled mainly from corn. (You actually need to add a certain % of malted barley because it contains enzymes that convert the corn starch to sugar – yeast can’t eat starch, only sugar).
3. High proof.
Or, in a few words, corn liquor as it comes directly from the still.
You might think that this is the basically same thing as vodka or Everclear but despite being clear has quite a bit of corn taste because vodka is usually distilled more perfectly and filtered .
As an aside, of the operations I observed (via a friend with family in southwest Virginia), their entire production was sold to black club owners in Baltimore, Prince George's county in Maryland, Richmond, and the Norfolk/Newport News area. The club owners "cut" higher quality whiskey with it and sell it to drunk revelers that can't tell the difference or that use enough mixer the taste is hidden. I can't imagine anyone drinking it by choice.
350+ years of family history in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky means you learn something about moonshine just by osmosis.As I said before, virtually all moonshine today (in the US) is made from sugar - not sugar derived from corn, but from big bags of sugar. One of the difficulties in running a modern moonshine operation is how to buy large amounts of sugar (hundreds of pounds at a time) without attracting attention. Whatever you sampled that was bought at a liquor store was not real moonshine.
Joseph Dabney's "Mountain Spirits: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James' Ulster Plantation to America's Appalachians and the Moonshine Life" is good for the history and traditions of the subject, while Alec Wilkinson's "Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor" is good on the business and law enforcement aspects.Replies: @kaganovitch, @petit bourgeois, @Jack D
RG, excellent reply and “King Philip’s” war was a time of great turmoil in the settlements. For those who can’t figure out who King Philip was, he was a chief who took the tittle King to go with his new name.
There is a separate program for blacks called National Achievement Scholarship Program, with lower score cutoffs.
In my daughter’s HS, there were quite a few National Merit Scholars but none of them black. There was however, one black girl (ADOS but both of her parents were doctors) who was a National Achievement Scholar. When they took the group photo of the winners, my daughter said that this girl (who, BTW, did not have a racial chip on her shoulder – she had been around white people her whole life and was very comfortable with them and ended up at some Northeastern liberal arts college – Williams or something like that) joked to the other girls, “Hey, I’m pretty smart… for a black girl.” (Blacks are allowed to make jokes about themselves but white people are not allowed to say things like that.)
Whenever it comes to black academic achievement, it almost always has to have an asterisk next to it. If blacks (even Igbos) were held to the same standards as whites and Asians, Ivy League u’s would be 1 or 2% black, if that. The effects of the shifted black mean IQ and the small space under the normal curve at the tails guaranty this. 130 IQ is 3 SDs out from the black mean where you need a microscope to find the area under the curve.
Probably even more than 3 SDs. ADOS have about a 20% European admixture, and their test gap with US whites averages closer to 1.05 SDs. US black fertility has also long been more dysgenic than US white fertility, primarily because of the very low fertility of the smartest 20% of black women.
My limited professional experience with Igbos is they are kind and polite but have been over-promoted and have jobs that are over their head. Nigeria’s many large universities and elite private high schools were set up in imitation of England’s, and have the same classy sounding degrees as Eton and Oxford, but lower standards.Replies: @Johann Ricke
Once I asked him about the IQ difference. He acknowledged whites have higher IQs as a group. But he had this rejoinder--"I've known white people who were stupid and blacks who were smart."
His theme was that if you can find a black individual who was smarter than a white individual, higher white average IQ doesn't matter. A convoluted reasoning, but leftists go to any length.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
The funniest part of Hackett's book perhaps is a quotation from a contemporary of Toqueville who travelled through Appalachia and reported the people there eat the "stuff that we feed to the hogs".
There are errors in Hackett's book which are so egregious that it is clear that his research was sloppy and done with tunnel vision to confirm his prejudices. I will be kind and say that Hackett is a jackass. A few very good bits. A comparison would be an NFL player who has as many fumbles lost as spectacular touchdowns. It is not to your credit if you find Albion's Seed a good book.
The Beverly Hillbillies television show is much higher quality and similarly accurate.Replies: @Bill Jones, @Crawfurdmuir
Somewhat similar is Dr. Johnson’s definition (1755) of oats as ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’
In the US for example, until recent decades the soybean was not considered to be human food, although it has been eaten as people food in Asia for millennia.
In France, corn in any form was not a normal item in the human diet. Humans ate wheat (bread). If maize was grown at all, it was as cattle food. Seeing humans eat the stuff would have seemed to a 19th century Frenchman like you would see someone sitting down to eat a plate of hay.
"In the middle of the 17th century, while the leftist Puritans were temporarily on top in English politics, rightist Cavaliers migrated from England to Virginia to more or less reproduce the English class structure in their own conservative utopia."
Steve, you got the order of settlement wrong right off the bat. Virginia was settled before New England. America was not founded by Pilgrims. There was a functioning House of Burgesses in Virginia before the Pilgrims even arrived.Replies: @John Milton's Ghost, @Emil Nikola Richard, @dearieme, @MEH 0910, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Scott Alexander:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
Scots-Irish and Germans were settling in the mountains long before there was a tax on whiskey. The Whiskey Rebellion occurred in 1791 and the Feds made their point, then quietly backtracked. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that taxes were imposed on whiskey again.
IMO, the best source for King Philip’s War is Flintlock and Tomahawk by Douglas Leach. Avoid the Jill Lepore nonsense. She’s a woke leftist.
It’s perhaps just a trick imposed by time and preservation of records, but I have more ancestors who were directly involved in King Philip’s War (as militia soldiers, political leaders, or settlers attacked in their homes) than in any other American conflict, the Civil War not excepted.
I’ve not seen the first 2 books, Bardon, but, interestingly, the same friend who gave me Albion’s Seed gave me Guns, Germs, and Steel the same time. I got about 10% through it, and that was enough.
I’ve heard that the conquest of Mexico went the same way. Many tribes understandably hated the Aztecs by the time the Spaniards arrived, and they were manipulating Cortes as much as Cortes was manipulating them. The Cholula massacre is a great example. And of course, Pizarro down in the Andes was coming right into a civil war environment. It’d be a big mistake to assume that the native peoples didn’t have their own agenda with the strangers.
The one unifying theme of why the age of colonization went the way it did truly was disease. And not just in the Americas or in Australia/New Zealand: apparently, the indigenous Siberians were just as devastated by smallpox as the Russians moved east, as were the native Central Asian steppe peoples as the Chinese (Kangxi survived smallpox as a kid-I guess the Manchus had acclimated?) moved west during the early Qing dynasty. It was the same dynamic: they had been isolated from the big European or Asian disease pools all those centuries, and once you got past the places where there was regular contact with those disease pools, they were vulnerable.
Putting aside the tax status, moonshine is usually:
1. Unaged and therefore clear.
2. Traditionally distilled mainly from corn. (You actually need to add a certain % of malted barley because it contains enzymes that convert the corn starch to sugar - yeast can't eat starch, only sugar).
3. High proof.
Or, in a few words, corn liquor as it comes directly from the still.
You might think that this is the basically same thing as vodka or Everclear but despite being clear has quite a bit of corn taste because vodka is usually distilled more perfectly and filtered .Replies: @William Badwhite
Correct. It would be corn liquor or sugar liquor or whatever it was that you have in the jug.
We’re not talking about physical attributes, rather the name of the drink. Moonshine, mountain dew, white lightning, swamp root, moonbeam, etc refer to the same thing – illegally sold whiskey.
I don’t think that because I know of what I write. I am not and have never been involved in the moonshine business, but I’ve seen operations up close and have tasted it – its disgusting.
As an aside, of the operations I observed (via a friend with family in southwest Virginia), their entire production was sold to black club owners in Baltimore, Prince George’s county in Maryland, Richmond, and the Norfolk/Newport News area. The club owners “cut” higher quality whiskey with it and sell it to drunk revelers that can’t tell the difference or that use enough mixer the taste is hidden. I can’t imagine anyone drinking it by choice.
350+ years of family history in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky means you learn something about moonshine just by osmosis.
As I said before, virtually all moonshine today (in the US) is made from sugar – not sugar derived from corn, but from big bags of sugar. One of the difficulties in running a modern moonshine operation is how to buy large amounts of sugar (hundreds of pounds at a time) without attracting attention. Whatever you sampled that was bought at a liquor store was not real moonshine.
Joseph Dabney’s “Mountain Spirits: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James’ Ulster Plantation to America’s Appalachians and the Moonshine Life” is good for the history and traditions of the subject, while Alec Wilkinson’s “Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor” is good on the business and law enforcement aspects.
So when I want 200 proof alcohol (not the denatured stuff which contains poison, otherwise known as laquer thinner) to make hash oil in my kitchen (to give away to friends at Christmas, I'm not a big fan of the stuff), I go to Baja California where they sell pure 200 proof alcohol made from sugar cane. There is no way I could even take a sip of that nasty liquor. It's only good for practical purposes rather than consumption.
Speaking of Mexican liquor, lately I've been fascinated by raicilla, otherwise known as Mexican moonshine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raicilla
I'm going to try and bring a bottle home from Tijuana this weekend if I can find it, because it's too damn expensive in the US. As a tequila and mezcal aficionado, I absolutely must find out what it tastes like.Replies: @Jack D
Any time you are dealing with an illegal product, quality control goes out the door - you're dealing with criminals to begin with and there are no government inspectors to enforce purity. Even back in the day, moonshine would often have lead in it because they would reuse old car radiators and other things with lead in them and they wouldn't discard the "heads" and "tails" which contain methanol and fusel oils and other undesirable stuff. But there are better criminals and worse criminals.
Speaking of sugar, the USSR had its own tradition of untaxed alcohol called "samagon". When I was in Ukraine (long before the current war) supermarkets sold 50 lb. sacks of sugar and I don't think it was for making jam.
“… the uncanny skills of several famous black cowboys such as Robert Lemmons (1848–1947), who could cajole a herd of wild mustangs to follow him into a corral through force of personality.”
I’ve read the same thing about the Irish Gypsies/Tinkers/Travelers, who with a whistle could command their string of ponies to follow them home after market day.
PS:
In exchange for King Philip’s War, which I had zero knowledge of, I’ll plug the Russian conquest of Siberia. To learn about another country’s “Manifest Destiny” (there are others but I think the Russian one has the most interesting parallels for the US), the differences and similarities, as an American is insightful IMO. It also shows just how far back Sino-Russian contact goes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yermak_Timofeyevich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nerchinsk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language_education_in_Russia
Well before the Americans, Russian gunboats had arrived in Japan. The earliest incidence being 文化露寇 Bunka rokō “Bunka Russian Invasion” (1806), or Khvostov Incident--
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/文化露寇
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku#Challenges_to_seclusion
The Perry Expedition wasn’t until 1853.
This is where the Chinese, like Americans, are often solipsistic. The Japanese being the center bogeyman of the "Century of Humiliation" and all. But the Japanese were simply responding to Western and Russian imperial incursion like the Chinese, and ended up signing the same bunch of unequal treaties,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_treaty#Imposed_on_Japan
The Chinese had also at times, played the Russians and Japanese off against one another. A main reason that Kwantung Army intervened in Manchuria was the risk that both the KMT and Zhili Clique (in addition to the CCP) would go over on the side of Soviets,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanggutun_incident
Fast forward to today, plus ça change
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Analysis-China-feels-slight-unease-in-intimidating-Japan-with-Russia
* Treaty of Nerchinsk was was not signed in Chinese but Manchu, Japanese historians usually give this as argument for the alien, non-Chinese nature of the Qing.
OT: Barbie’s boyfriend Ken appeared to turn gay nearly 30 years ago:
Ryan Gosling will play Ken in the forthcoming Barbie movie, and is getting into character:
I wondered how long it would be before Barbie enhanced her relationship with Ken by going transgender. Google supplies the surprising answer: about two weeks ago!
https://boingboing.net/2022/06/01/mattel-debuts-their-first-transgender-barbie.html
“no history before 1619”
Isn’t that true in the literal sense though? weren’t pre-colonial blacks literally prehistoric?
Even the Iron Age was a late arrival, nearly a thousand years later than in the Near East and Europe: much of Africa was isolated from the rest of the world before camels were introduced to the Sahara Desert around 2,000 years ago.
*Imagine an America in which, instead of blacks, 13% of the population is, say, Japanese. Race would be far less relevant and, to the extent there is contention, it would be over assimilation, culture, etc.Replies: @Corn, @R.G. Camara, @SFG, @J.Ross
13% Japanese? Worse music and sports, better ceramics, seafood, and cartoons.
As for sports, I find Judo, wrestling, and gymnastics to be more interesting than basketball, but YMMV.Replies: @SFG
Unlike British, European or other immigrant populations the negro is a dependent population. They were unable to settle anywhere as pioneers because they could not sustain themselves without a pre-existing community to give them work or funding. Nothing has changed in 400 years.
As an aside, of the operations I observed (via a friend with family in southwest Virginia), their entire production was sold to black club owners in Baltimore, Prince George's county in Maryland, Richmond, and the Norfolk/Newport News area. The club owners "cut" higher quality whiskey with it and sell it to drunk revelers that can't tell the difference or that use enough mixer the taste is hidden. I can't imagine anyone drinking it by choice.
350+ years of family history in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky means you learn something about moonshine just by osmosis.As I said before, virtually all moonshine today (in the US) is made from sugar - not sugar derived from corn, but from big bags of sugar. One of the difficulties in running a modern moonshine operation is how to buy large amounts of sugar (hundreds of pounds at a time) without attracting attention. Whatever you sampled that was bought at a liquor store was not real moonshine.
Joseph Dabney's "Mountain Spirits: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James' Ulster Plantation to America's Appalachians and the Moonshine Life" is good for the history and traditions of the subject, while Alec Wilkinson's "Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor" is good on the business and law enforcement aspects.Replies: @kaganovitch, @petit bourgeois, @Jack D
One of the difficulties in running a modern moonshine operation is how to buy large amounts of sugar (hundreds of pounds at a time) without attracting attention.
A guy I know from W. Virginia told me that his family used to ‘launder’ the sugar through a bakery that a cousin owned.
Some of the earliest black slaves in the Middle Colonies were from the Portuguese-influenced areas of Kongo and Angola. Back home, he might be named António for St. Anthony of Padua (a Portuguese native). Comes to America, and he’s named Anthony:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist)
A number of triracial groups in the South claimed Portuguese ancestry, which probably points to the Portuguese influence on the African coast. The Portuguese were the “prestige” people, so any mulattoes from there would claim their Portuguese ancestry over their African ancestry.
The Stono Rebellion was an Angolan affair:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stono_Rebellion
“ 130 IQ is 3 SDs out from the black mean”
Probably even more than 3 SDs. ADOS have about a 20% European admixture, and their test gap with US whites averages closer to 1.05 SDs. US black fertility has also long been more dysgenic than US white fertility, primarily because of the very low fertility of the smartest 20% of black women.
My limited professional experience with Igbos is they are kind and polite but have been over-promoted and have jobs that are over their head. Nigeria’s many large universities and elite private high schools were set up in imitation of England’s, and have the same classy sounding degrees as Eton and Oxford, but lower standards.
In the South, blacks were more integrated than they have been in, say, Steve Sailer’s favorite quadrant of southeastern Wisconsin. Blacks had good reason to believe they were genetically related to their (former) masters, which the former masters often knew and remembered. They shared a common culture going back several centuries. Contrast that with living next to Germans and Poles in Milwaukee or Norwegians in Madison. Heck, in Milwaukee they had to rely on an Italian priest (Fr. Groppi) to really organize them.
Probably even more than 3 SDs. ADOS have about a 20% European admixture, and their test gap with US whites averages closer to 1.05 SDs. US black fertility has also long been more dysgenic than US white fertility, primarily because of the very low fertility of the smartest 20% of black women.
My limited professional experience with Igbos is they are kind and polite but have been over-promoted and have jobs that are over their head. Nigeria’s many large universities and elite private high schools were set up in imitation of England’s, and have the same classy sounding degrees as Eton and Oxford, but lower standards.Replies: @Johann Ricke
Tidjane Thiam was Credit Suisse CEO for 5 years. He isn’t Nigerian, but it’s the same neck of the woods. Theoretically, he wasn’t given any mulligans, and his academic record is said to be outstanding. However, CS is a huge mess after his departure. How many land mines did he plant inadvertently during his tenure? Was he seriously overpromoted? The guy is 59. Why hasn’t he moved on at least laterally? Why is he working for a nonprofit, in what may be a Michelle Obama-style no-show job?
American blacks could migrate en masse to these islands, which are black dominated and largely black-run, where the weather is suited to them and where their culture dominates, and yet they don't do so.
Besides a brief minor migration to Liberia in Africa (which many second generation blacks quickly ran back to America from), American blacks have shunned "back to Africa." Most will argue its because 19th and 20th century "colonialism" ruined them.
Yet the Caribbean offered something closer and fresher and untouched by the Scramble for Africa, and yet blacks from the Caribbean from it to America as much as they can.
I would think blacks would rather love being the biggest, richest, smartest Big Man in a small island. But they'd rather "suffer" under "racism" in America.Replies: @SafeNow, @Ed
Maybe it’s just my anecdotal observations, but I have noticed that blacks working in nursing homes or home elderly care tend to be from the Caribbean. If that’s indeed the case, then what’s going on? They are more empathic than other black ancestry and demographic groups? Don’t mind cleaning bedpans? Less inclined to steal jewelry?
It depends on one’s education. The first and the third books are interesting to me because I know relatively less about Economics and Anthropology. The second book is shallow to me since I have a background in Science/Technology and the stuff the author writes are simplistic. If I had a strong background in economics, I would probably think so of the first book but find the second book interesting.
No, Black behavior is pretty consistent across time and space and that includes Black migrants in Europe and Australia that were never enslaved. You’re putting the cart before the horse. That’s not to say the deep resentment that White liberals ingrain in Blacks doesn’t make things worse – it certainly adds fuel to the fire. But just as there’s no magic dirt there is also no magic culture.
I get it – they’re surrounded by intellectually superior races trying to tell them what to do and how to live their lives. That would annoy me to no end too. But beyond that I’m out of sympathy. As Mohamed Ali quipped after visiting an Africa free of White people and White civilization, “thank God my granddaddy got on that boat”
Because Fischer writes history, the sales of his books are going to be limited, compared to something like romance novels. A certain segment of history writers have figured out that if they kiss black butt hard, they earning large publishing advances, awards, and sell a lot of books to SJWs who buy the tome because they think they have to.
I have seen this happen to Hampton Sides. After the wonderful Blood and Thunder, he wrote that stupid and boring Hellhound on His Trail. He got down on his knees and kissed black butt like a groveling sycophant.
Ron Chernow, who wrote classic books about Hamilton and Washington, decided to kiss black butt obliquely with that cretinous Grant–cause Grant freed the slaves, you know. That silly hagiography is a laughing stock among the Civil War community.
It’s very likely they got pressured by their retarded SJW New York editors to choose these topics, and it’s pitiful seeing these writers waste their talent. I hope their careers don’t go down the toilet of blackity black black all the time for the rest of their productive lives. I’ll quit reading them if they do.
From settlement to King Philip’s war there was no major conflict. The Massachussets Bay colony was rough so there were incidents but not big ones. The Pilgrims aimed for friendly relations. They and the Narrangassets tried to stay out the fight. Native Americans were educated at Harvard.
The Colony was at least half NA. 6500 Praying Indians and 6500 English with 400 Pilgrims and 2000 Narrangassets on the sidelines. The Whampanoags numbered 14000 with similar weapons and more casual fightin experience.
After the war, relations with the NAs never recovered.
I’m aware for years: there is no Conspiracy, but there are conspiracies. Or cowardice. Or simply inertia. Or greed of ruling classes. Or evil permeating all strata of society (read Jimmy Savile). Or…
Forget about Albion’s seeds. Let’s hear grumpy Simon Webb on current Albion. Just read a few comments. Makes my blood boil…
Engerland
Very similar story to my experience living in an area of East Manchester. The people who made the decision to let a massive influx of Somalian immigrants to live in the area didn’t give a toss about the communities and their thoughts who have lived there all their lifes and generations before. Had to leave in the end sadly and I drive through there every day to get to work and the change is eye openingly unbelievable, its a complete shit hole As long as they are getting a good diversity multiculturalism back slap and is not on their front door step its an easy choice to make for them.
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Shaun Patrick O’Jameson
Every one of them, no matter of unproductive and unlikely to achieve anything, is another point on the “representation” scale for people with a similar skin tone. Another million arrive, and the BBC appoints a new African news reader who has no association with them whatsoever, but “represents” them somehow.
———————————————————–
Melanie Wilson
I was annoyed to find out that man city’s old stadium Maine rd was not only given to Somalians the locals were told that those houses were bought and were not housing authority .it was found to be lies as they are housing association and paid for by d.s.s. yet they had for sale signs on them and some still do 15yrs later.the councill were asked about this and denied this was true .I beg to differ as a friend who lives near Maine rd was told this by a Somalian that was given a house there when he came to England …
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Janet Green
It certainly is a ‘general trend’! The Welsh Assembly, in their wisdom, has made Wales the Nation of Sanctuary. Quite what these individuals of many and varied nations, colours, creeds, religions, beliefs are seeking sanctuary from, baffles me! They wander around aimlessly, usually in groups, which many find intimidating. They certainly do not seem at all fazed, or uncertain, being in a foreign country, but the size of their groups is very offputting, indeed. They are housed , receive benefits and, all the many and varied advantages that good old Blighty has to offer, whilst the local areas deteriorate, crime rates and types of crime soar and, those that are homeless and, fill up the shop doorways, or the few that still trade, are certainly not foreign: they are our own and, not for them are the streets literally paved with crisp, non earned, benefit money and, the security of knowing there’s more and, more, where that came from!! As we celebrate the Platinum Jubilee, few of us recognise the country that enthused us with patriotism all those decades ago!!
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huudi elbo
In 1960 I landed at RAF Eastleigh Kenya. I asked at the camp gate about a local bus in to town, he advised against it saying that I risked a knife in my Ribs then found me a lift to Nairobi.
I remembered this after catching a Bus recently in Chelmsford, For once I was glad for the hard plastic seats, I felt sorry for the few white schoolchildren. This change has come with the new ‘city’ status and a massive building program stretching from the East End, past Chelmsford towards the coast.
It is clear that our politicians & builders care nothing about the death & destruction they cause while in pursuit of money.
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MissLisaJane
I came from the East End of London (Canning Town/Plaistow). Time context: born 1969 so childhood 70’s/80’s. It had seen much historical immigration, by my time the Jews had moved to more salubrious areas and the Irish had practically integrated and absorbed into the English population. My immediate neighbourhood remained largely white, though 15 minutes up the road it was a different story. We had our share of blacks & Asians but in that immediate corner of the East End things weren’t too bad. The indigenous English formed the majority. The writing was on the wall early on. In my experience the rot started in part with one unfortunate by-product of the 60s – the idealist left who infiltrated the areas of media, local government and education. I found that the more ‘intelligent’ and high achievers among my peers who mainly came from higher income families would look down their noses in disdain on me who held views akin to Simon and wasn’t afraid to voice it on occasion. I think they were conscious of their intellect in the comprehensive system and ingratiated themselves with ‘hip’ staff whilst still supporting West Ham (plastic cockneys really). I wasn’t bullied by fellow pupils but was victimized by a few left-wing teachers. Who knows when the threshold was/is reached when an area has been ‘lost’. Sometimes it’s insidious like a cancer and sometimes incredibly sudden. Labour controlled Newham Council was also complicit in the eradication of my culture. It’s diversity obsession that celebrates every culture apart from the one which originally put it in its position of power i.e. the white working classes. I don’t view my upbringing through steriotypical rose-coloured glasses (jellied eels 🤢), but I left an area in its death throes in 1997. If the immigrant population wish to revisit their roots, they can: I’m sure many a Memory Lane still remain in Jamaica, India etc. This is a priviledge now denied to many like me. I haven’t revisited the East End in 15 years (my heart is scared to). My condolences to others on here who are witnessing their areas’ suffocation & death. I read that the true cockney accent will be extinct in about 20 years. An area, culture and way of life eradicated in a generation.
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Bryan Mcdougall
I would love to know how many non England citizens have been given access to live there over the last 20 years? Why? What was wrong with England that someone decided to open the flood gates to the masses?
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maixiu
Similar situation in Lewiston, Maine. Thousands of Somalis were plunked down in a thoroughly white city. The results were very easy to predict.
Immigrant labor. Work cheaper.
Melungeons aren’t even triracial they are biracial: descendants of mostly mulattoish African men (likely recently freed slaves; manumission was surprisingly common in the 1600s/1700s) and British/Irish women (indentured servant types).
There are these isolates all over the South and only in Louisiana do they admit to their partial African ancestry (Creoles). In my area their MO is to claim to be Native Americans.
*Imagine an America in which, instead of blacks, 13% of the population is, say, Japanese. Race would be far less relevant and, to the extent there is contention, it would be over assimilation, culture, etc.Replies: @Corn, @R.G. Camara, @SFG, @J.Ross
13% Japanese
WTF, I now love public transportation, and walking around cities at night.
Not forgetting the transported criminals and indentured labourers to do the actual work.
Ryan Gosling is so gay-but-in-the-closet he might as well be the Montgomery Cliff of the current age. Gosling’s lesbian Latina “wife” doesn’t even bother to attend award shows for him, so he can get up there and thank “her” when its obvious he’s thanking his gay lover.
I’m pretty impressed how Gosling escapes gay rumors so well, given that he’s a pretty boy, famous actor who gives off every closeted vibe in the book. I can’t decide whether he or Bradley Cooper (“I love Lady Gaga! And all my female co-stars describe me as their ‘best friend, but I never hook up with them!’”) is the best modern example of a major gay movie star who manages to play it straight for the public and has zero rumors about his true orientation come out.
I mean, even Tom Cruise and Hugh Jackman, as successful as they are at playing butch, have had their gay backstories leaked a bit. There would at least be some hopeful-gay rumors about Cooper/Gosling normally, as homosexuals would fantasize and invent stories about hookups with them. Cooper and Gosling’s agent(s) and managers must be incredibly good at controlling the gay gossip wags.
There are these isolates all over the South and only in Louisiana do they admit to their partial African ancestry (Creoles). In my area their MO is to claim to be Native Americans.Replies: @Steve Sailer
If you can persuade the federal government to accept your claim to be an Indian tribe, you can get a casino out of it.
Hi Bardon,
I don’t always agree with your point of view, but I think you’re spot-on with this post.
To be honest, I always thought that Albion’s Seed sounded more like the title of an Orson Scott Card book than a work of American history. It is, as you say, extremely overrated.
But as to why it’s taken seriously, the general idea around the iSteve blog seems to be that white Americans of a White Identitarian bent seek to claim historical and cultural continuity with the Albion immigrant waves as a way to forge a contemporary group identity and bolster their claims to political preference in these lands.
I think it’s doubtful that such a thing is even possible anymore, but quite apart from that, it certainly isn’t what anybody is actually doing. Do any Americans really think of themselves as English colonists these days? No, that identity is dead and gone. And do the Alt-White type around here actually maintain any sort of continuity with the beliefs of their ancestors? It seems not. Their ancestors were Christian, but the Alt-White tends to laugh at Christianity and glom onto the shallow, unmetaphysical metaphysics of Darwin and Galton. And then there is always the paradox that progressivism was advanced every step of the way by Albionic white men. It was white abolitionists who freed the slaves, white reformers who expanded the franchise to include women, and white judges and legislators who implemented the policies of the Civil Rights era. The Alt-White wants to claim historical continuity with a group of ancestors while at the same time eschewing the beliefs that their ancestors really did hold. They would find support for their stated goals if they turned towards Traditional Christianity (i.e pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism), but there is little strain of that in post-Reformation English history, and almost none in America.
Albion doesn’t provide much to hang an identity on. It was always a protest movement made up of people who were leaving an earlier identity.
As an aside, of the operations I observed (via a friend with family in southwest Virginia), their entire production was sold to black club owners in Baltimore, Prince George's county in Maryland, Richmond, and the Norfolk/Newport News area. The club owners "cut" higher quality whiskey with it and sell it to drunk revelers that can't tell the difference or that use enough mixer the taste is hidden. I can't imagine anyone drinking it by choice.
350+ years of family history in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky means you learn something about moonshine just by osmosis.As I said before, virtually all moonshine today (in the US) is made from sugar - not sugar derived from corn, but from big bags of sugar. One of the difficulties in running a modern moonshine operation is how to buy large amounts of sugar (hundreds of pounds at a time) without attracting attention. Whatever you sampled that was bought at a liquor store was not real moonshine.
Joseph Dabney's "Mountain Spirits: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James' Ulster Plantation to America's Appalachians and the Moonshine Life" is good for the history and traditions of the subject, while Alec Wilkinson's "Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor" is good on the business and law enforcement aspects.Replies: @kaganovitch, @petit bourgeois, @Jack D
In California and Nevada, proof is limited to 151, which is why Bacardi 151 is the strongest liquor you can buy. Ironically, you can buy pure grain alcohol at the state liquor stores in Utah.
So when I want 200 proof alcohol (not the denatured stuff which contains poison, otherwise known as laquer thinner) to make hash oil in my kitchen (to give away to friends at Christmas, I’m not a big fan of the stuff), I go to Baja California where they sell pure 200 proof alcohol made from sugar cane. There is no way I could even take a sip of that nasty liquor. It’s only good for practical purposes rather than consumption.
Speaking of Mexican liquor, lately I’ve been fascinated by raicilla, otherwise known as Mexican moonshine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raicilla
I’m going to try and bring a bottle home from Tijuana this weekend if I can find it, because it’s too damn expensive in the US. As a tequila and mezcal aficionado, I absolutely must find out what it tastes like.
That war happened long, long before the silly concept of the Noble Savage took hold in American mythology.
Corn, a few of us still study early American history and do not get our facts from Hollywood cowboy movies.Replies: @R.G. Camara
Robert Frost, the 20th Century New England poet, was part of that “I love noble savages” tradition. He wrote a poem called “The Vanishing Red” about the murder/death of the last known Indian in Acton, MA, killed laughingly and cruelly by a local white Miller.
https://poets.org/poem/vanishing-red
Frost’s poem is condemning and attacking on the whites, and mournful for the Indian. Shades of gay Anderson Cooper giggling about his ancestors being murdered by their slaves.
I used to vibe with Frost’s holier-than-thou attitude and plaintive tale. After reading about the actual brutality and truth of Indian attacks, while I can’t say I’m on the miller’s side, I can at least say I understand why he would take pleasure in revenging his ancestral blood on the side that did his family wrong.
She was under the clear impression her son was some kind of genius from early on (age five at least), which might have made her overprotective - or have added to her willingness to (over)protect him... - and that might well have been part of John Kennedy Toole's deadly fate***.
Walker Percy complained repeatedly to his wife about her in the process. -
It took Walker Percy a while before he got the impression, that the fat insisting old half-widow with the genius fixation actually - did have a point with regard to the comical/ absurd/satirical new-orleansian novel she had tried very hard indeed to make him read and promote!
Ignatius Reilly and the author both leaned towards Boethius' - if not humorous than at least wise worldview out of the dilemma, their existence - mirrored.
What sets both men so to speak apart from maany a soul in the alt-right is their sense of humor and - their willingness to make concessions (= to accept that the rage they felt inside did not only stem from - the others... - the left/the government/ the system...).
John F. Kennedy's death seems to have hit him midships (in his heart) - for whatever reason. ***
Thologian/ philosopher Boehtius (5th century) was one of the rare classical figures in Western history, who somehow got the nature of existential paradoxes (a predecessor of Montaigne's idea of the fluctuation or reality and his and the French Moralists' dry clarity).******
****** It's a bit disappointing that not that many literary scientists seem to care. - But here is at least one I could find - and he shares my astonishment about the scholarly - ignorance (= heheh: the scholarly Confederacy of the Dunces - with regard to the Confederacy of the Dunces - full fat luminous and glitteringly roundabout of circles - - -within a circle***** ...).
: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+refutation+of+Robert+Byrne%3a+John+Kennedy+Toole%27s+a+confederacy+of...-a0296836107Replies: @James J. O'Meara
I have to disagree with that: I don’t think there’s any evidence in the book of Ignatius ever acknowledging the source of his weirdness — the death of his father and pet dog — or displaying any “sense of humor”. In terms of the distinction btw a clown and a buffoon, IR is not a clown (a trained humorist) but a buffoon (his speech and behavior is unintentionally funny). When IR says he “rode into the heart of darkness on a Greyhound bus (one of the funniest lines I ever read), he’s not telling a joke but being one.
I’ve noted the “Ignatius Reilly” type among the alt-right many times in the past. Actually, I knew two “conservative” guys, about ten years apart, who were almost carbon copies of IR, at least in terms of their weight and proudly “eccentric” ideas and mannerisms. Someone I’ve forgotten described a related type, basing themselves on G. K. Chesterton, with walrus moustaches filled with pub-fare cheese and cracker crumbs that would spew out as they pounded the table or bar top, shouting they’d “stand for no damn’d nonsense!”
For some reason they’re usually Catholic, although those guys I knew were a Mormon (who loved Led Zeppelin and taught me the iSteve point that musical taste is determined by what was on the radio when you were 13) and a Jew (the first “neocon” I ever met). The reason is obvious, the Catholic idea that all our problems stem from deviating from the Church’s various teachings (what IR calls “insufficient theology and geometry). Today, they’re Trad Caths, like E. Michael Jones or Nick Fuentes, pounding the table and demanding a return to good, sound Throne and Altar systems of government.
But it’s broader than that, on the alt-right; it’s all those guys who thought our Current Problems could only be solved by — surprise! — the application, good and hard, of their favorite hobby horse, usually some moribund European beardo-weirdo, like Nietzsche (remember how Spencer would quote him?) Dugin, Evola, Heidegger, etc. Anything but, you know, sitting down and think up a way of solving the problems that 300 million ordinary folks would go along with; because it’s not about solving the problem of Jewish control or racial violence, it’s about never letting a crisis go to waste, if you can use it to talk about your hobbyhorse.
Not these other guys, though. The serious application of some Olde Europe school of thought to problems in 21st century America requires a total lack of self-awareness or of a sense of humor (the two go together). It’s like a heavy metal band adding umlauts to their name (The interviews in Spinal Tap could be any number of alt-right podcasts).
Think of Spencer’s monologue on his favorite hamburger: buffoon, not clown. “What’s so funny?” Steve Bannon still tries to work both the Dugin and Catholic angles, despite the former being an ex-Satanist and Third Rome fanatic. He actually has a pretty good sense of humor, though.
The reason neither Reilly nor Toole did manage to be adored by the alt-right at all as far as I found out so far is the following: The self-reflective weakness that irony, when spotted in painfull/ humorous reflections of one's self/ oneself not least - necessarily carries with it. This existential twilight is no favored alt-right territory. - Igantius Reilly's mind is twofold (Hegel) and thusly embodies the very soul of the modern man: To be Torn and Frayed (Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street (my italics). And that is, hhhe, ca. 10 000 lightyears away from the alt-right old fashioned self-righteousness and stubbornness you describe (and - rightfully, I want to say, make fun of).Now: One could always heed the suspicion that Toole/Reilly's irony in the name of God could not be of the real (or: pure!) kind. Or would be a contradictio in adjecto even. - This would be the radical or: pure (=utterly principled = hyper-protestant, mega-rational) take on Toole/ Reilly and my impression is that this misconception of them is widespread. But this take, I'd hold, reveals more about the - however implicit or explicit - protestant/modern presuppositions than about the playful and soul liberating fun this novel embodies. Protestant stiffness of the hips makes protestants a bit prone to negate such existential subtleties and artsy widenings of our understanding of (not only) the social reality. The alt-right might not least suffer from such a restricted modern way of thinking. Its true though: The whole-hearted refutation of everything two-folded and undecided and deeply foolish lies then right around the corner.In short: It all depends whether one is willing to accept that people can feel safely in God's hand and still be deeply human - while making fun of themselves - and of others. - This somemthing about the glorious Confederacy of Dunces, that the snowflakes and the woke don't get either, of couse. H. Vernon Leighton in his Confederacy essay I've linked above, puts that this way: "Toole clearly understood the Boethian idea that an apparently malevolent, worldly Fortune could be under the control of Destiny, the temporal agent of God's beneficent Providence." - This understanding I think is the foundation of the Confederacy and it also hints at a form of liberty/ honored individuality outside the norms of everyday life. As I said: I know that this Fool in Christ menatlity can always be revealed as self-contradictory. Or criticised as a justification of a narrow religious worldview (or: a metaphysical illusion). Yeah, yeah, yeah! You can do that and people do it. - - But then, there is this defense of the A Confederacy of Dunces: Namely that lots of readers laughed till tears came / Out of their ears, while reading it. - I know, that the deeply principled fundamentalist modernist and woke counter-argument even at this point could always be: Ok, those readers laughed - but they laughed in a pre-enlightened (=REPRESSIVE/ self-denigrating..) mindframe, which shows in gross clarity, that their laughter was futile (Ha-ha Said the Clown/ Yardbirds).The scene I mentioned above, in which Igantius Reilly dances - even though, as he tells us a) he does not want to and b) he does not know how to - is not least that: An imitation of the Fool in Christ as embodied in a classical manner by Simeon of Emesa. The Lexicon of All Saints knows about this man, that he acted foolishly in public as a masquerade to get through to the simple minded ones. And that is exactly what Ignatius Reilly did want to achieve in this scene - as he - repeatedly even - tells the readers: To reach simple minded black womenfolk. Now: To achieve his goal to reach the simple minded ones Simeon of Emesa too, the prototypical Fool in Christ - danced, jumped (the Stones again!), slouched, staggered... - verbatim as Ignatius Reilly told us, that he too - did. Until the end, when he - as I said: Christ is at play here too: Had to suffer and tumble and - fall even - before being - resurrected by his delighted audience...
New Orleans women talk to their mom on the phone 5-9 times a day every single day.
New Orleans is the only place in the world I have been where people will sit around the table at lunch and spend a third of the meal conversation on what they should do for dinner. You might find this unappetizing. I find it unappetizing. They consider this normal.
Maybe a half of a sigma. Absolutely not two.
“This is an exciting ambition because Americans, white and black, tend to think of blacks as a largely homogeneous people with no history before 1619.”
“[Sub-Saharan] Africa has no history.”–20th century historian Arnold Toynbee.
The ability to learn and master complicated foreign languages is a mark of an exceptional IQ, and yet 20th century and 21st century IQ’s among US Blacks average around 85-88, hardly what one would consider the right side of the bell curve.
One should also consider that Sub-Saharan Africa, for eons of millennia of its history, tended to lack the various markers of advanced civilization that the rest of the world began to develop in its own cultures starting with the Iron Age onward (e.g. written alphabet, numeric system, moving away from cannibalism, technological developments such as ability to work with iron, metal, steel, etc).
Thus remains the dilemma. To be sure, there are prominent examples of individual Fulani tribe members who adapted to Western/Oriental Civilizations. But as a whole, and left to their own devices, Sub-Saharans failed to develop the wheel, much less a written alphabet or numeric systems. You could take a few Fulani out of the jungle, but if you leave the Fulani where they are in the jungle, they tended to remain at the mean of Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, which is, from a civilizational standpoint, about at the very bottom of world civilized cultures.
Perhaps Fischer should brush up on his Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard regarding Sub-Saharan Africans contributions’ to North America.
Man pretending to be woman incarcerated in men's prison sues for discrimination:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/06/09/transgender-woman-incarcerated-in-mens-prison-sues-for-discriminationReplies: @Gary in Gramercy
Better Born Innocent than Oz?
Phooey! Phoney baloney!
It's impressive that such a codger can manage to write a history; it's sad that the effort should be so ill-justified. I dare say he meant well.Replies: @Rapparee
A tall task for non-citizens until 1868. Cecil Chesterton:
To be clear, we are talking about a tiny fraction of black ancestry here (usually in the very low single digit percentage).Replies: @BB753, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Right, but one would assume it was mostly Cavaliers and Scotch-Irish who did intermingle with blacks, not Puritans, for obvious reasons. Or even Irish indentured laborers.
*Although the Cavaliers dominated the coastal upper South (Tidewater), bulk of the population in the region was of humbler backgrounds, i.e. poor farmers, sharecroppers, and indentured servants.
Plenty of Scots-Irish owned slaves, Andrew Jackson being the most famous, but they didn't own the huge, 17-18th century plantations on the coastal plain where most of them were imported.
So now in Southeastern Pennsylvania (which was William Penn's and the Quakers' original haunt) there are plenty of "Friends" organizations and schools and (largely repurposed) Meetinghouses, but a relatively few remaining Quakers. In the 1960s Civil Rights era the Quaker remnant (wealthy due to having held farmland real estate which later became inner ring suburbs) became rather meddlesome in the affairs of lower class white ethnics (mainly Roman Catholics) by getting involved in coerced integration of neighborhoods, schools, etc. There's a lesson here about excessive tolerance and declining demographics.Replies: @rebel yell, @Hibernian
selective tolerance FIFY
Steve and former Sen. Jim Webb both misread the book concerning the Scots-Irish. The “Backcountry” where the great majority of them settled was the Piedmont (west of the fall line) and the Shenandoah Valley, not the mountains. Many then migrated to Tennessee and the Lower South. But in the mountains, there were few Germans or English to intermarry with.
When you don’t belong somewhere in the first place, how many years you have been somewhere that you shouldn’t is a bug, not a feature. Longevity and seniority only count for positive things. A kid with 6 years on the honor roll is positive. A kid who has spent 5 years in the second grade is not.
The Russo-Japanese contact also goes back very far, the first Japanese arrived in Moscow in 1701–
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language_education_in_Russia
Well before the Americans, Russian gunboats had arrived in Japan. The earliest incidence being 文化露寇 Bunka rokō “Bunka Russian Invasion” (1806), or Khvostov Incident–
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/文化露寇
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku#Challenges_to_seclusion
The Perry Expedition wasn’t until 1853.
This is where the Chinese, like Americans, are often solipsistic. The Japanese being the center bogeyman of the “Century of Humiliation” and all. But the Japanese were simply responding to Western and Russian imperial incursion like the Chinese, and ended up signing the same bunch of unequal treaties,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_treaty#Imposed_on_Japan
The Chinese had also at times, played the Russians and Japanese off against one another. A main reason that Kwantung Army intervened in Manchuria was the risk that both the KMT and Zhili Clique (in addition to the CCP) would go over on the side of Soviets,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanggutun_incident
Fast forward to today, plus ça change
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Analysis-China-feels-slight-unease-in-intimidating-Japan-with-Russia
* Treaty of Nerchinsk was was not signed in Chinese but Manchu, Japanese historians usually give this as argument for the alien, non-Chinese nature of the Qing.
Occam’s razor suggests to third parties that he escapes ‘gay rumors’ because his homosexuality resides in your imagination and nowhere else.
Scots-Irish didn’t hang around much in areas with a lot of blacks.
The Bantu Expansion was an Iron Age culture.
In point of fact, when one thinks of the main contribution that Sub-Saharan Africa contributed most to the rest of the world for about the last 2,000 years, one thing stands out: Slaves. Bodies to work the fields (or harems) of the higher civilizations. So one would be amiss to overlook the single most important contribution that Sub-Saharans have indeed contributed to the rest of the world. In other words the Arabs of the 8th/9th centuries, as well as the Spanish and Portuguese of the 14th/15th centuries whether traveling to the edges of the southern Sahara or along the coast of Africa, the one thing that they wanted to get from various Sub-Saharan tribes was...bodies to work their various endeavors. Hardly an equitable trading arrangement among civilizational peers. ("We'll give you trinkets and stuff for a bunch of bodies to work our harems and sugar plantations")
As opposed to when they traveled to India, China, etc. where they treated the ancient civilizations as trading equals, peers. ("We'll trade our iron swords, various foodstuffs, etc for your paper, gunpowder, and do show us how to write out those most interesting Hindi numerals, which can only benefit our business endeavors and everyday lives. Also, do convey our gratitude to the Emperor tucked away in the Forbidden City.")
Even the accounts of Sub-Saharans as peoples greatly differ from they ways that the Chinese and Indians are described. The former are described in unflattering terms while the latter are described with overall respect as equals.
Some things never seem to change.
I've noted the "Ignatius Reilly" type among the alt-right many times in the past. Actually, I knew two "conservative" guys, about ten years apart, who were almost carbon copies of IR, at least in terms of their weight and proudly "eccentric" ideas and mannerisms. Someone I've forgotten described a related type, basing themselves on G. K. Chesterton, with walrus moustaches filled with pub-fare cheese and cracker crumbs that would spew out as they pounded the table or bar top, shouting they'd "stand for no damn'd nonsense!"
For some reason they're usually Catholic, although those guys I knew were a Mormon (who loved Led Zeppelin and taught me the iSteve point that musical taste is determined by what was on the radio when you were 13) and a Jew (the first "neocon" I ever met). The reason is obvious, the Catholic idea that all our problems stem from deviating from the Church's various teachings (what IR calls "insufficient theology and geometry). Today, they're Trad Caths, like E. Michael Jones or Nick Fuentes, pounding the table and demanding a return to good, sound Throne and Altar systems of government.
But it's broader than that, on the alt-right; it's all those guys who thought our Current Problems could only be solved by -- surprise! -- the application, good and hard, of their favorite hobby horse, usually some moribund European beardo-weirdo, like Nietzsche (remember how Spencer would quote him?) Dugin, Evola, Heidegger, etc. Anything but, you know, sitting down and think up a way of solving the problems that 300 million ordinary folks would go along with; because it's not about solving the problem of Jewish control or racial violence, it's about never letting a crisis go to waste, if you can use it to talk about your hobbyhorse.
Not these other guys, though. The serious application of some Olde Europe school of thought to problems in 21st century America requires a total lack of self-awareness or of a sense of humor (the two go together). It's like a heavy metal band adding umlauts to their name (The interviews in Spinal Tap could be any number of alt-right podcasts).
Think of Spencer's monologue on his favorite hamburger: buffoon, not clown. "What's so funny?" Steve Bannon still tries to work both the Dugin and Catholic angles, despite the former being an ex-Satanist and Third Rome fanatic. He actually has a pretty good sense of humor, though.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Dieter Kief, @Emil Nikola Richard
Ignatius J. Reilly is kind of G.K. Chesterton without the special something that made old G.K. a genius and a saint.
P.G. Wodehouse liked to have cruel fun at the fat Chesterton’s expense: “The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”
In the very long run, though, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton blend together in cultural memory.
I agree that Chinese sports (ping pong, badminton) are way more boring. But sumo is very similar to NFL interior linemen play, minus the CTE.
The newest Mongolian Yokozuna
Amongst the immense range of Japanese martial arts budō 武道, thousands of schools and styles, there are some very practical self defence skills, like Tankendō 短剣道, kendo with short swords,
https://poets.org/poem/vanishing-red
Frost's poem is condemning and attacking on the whites, and mournful for the Indian. Shades of gay Anderson Cooper giggling about his ancestors being murdered by their slaves.
I used to vibe with Frost's holier-than-thou attitude and plaintive tale. After reading about the actual brutality and truth of Indian attacks, while I can't say I'm on the miller's side, I can at least say I understand why he would take pleasure in revenging his ancestral blood on the side that did his family wrong.Replies: @Steve Sailer
The further west an American writer came from, the less he liked Indians. Mark Twain hated Indians.
And now he does — because of that book.
Just yesterday, I was in the last water-powered saw mill in Massachusetts, which only ceased operations within the last ten years.
And, just yesterday, I was in the oldest continuously occupied house in English-speaking North America.
This was all due to Albion’s Seed and my wife’s comments as I read it. These historical marvels belonged to her family descended from two brothers who emigrated from Kent on the great ship Hercules in 1634.
The notion that any informed person knew the substance of Albion’s Seed is a tautological dismissal. Albion’s Seed multiplied the number of informed people by a thousand times.
"In the middle of the 17th century, while the leftist Puritans were temporarily on top in English politics, rightist Cavaliers migrated from England to Virginia to more or less reproduce the English class structure in their own conservative utopia."
Steve, you got the order of settlement wrong right off the bat. Virginia was settled before New England. America was not founded by Pilgrims. There was a functioning House of Burgesses in Virginia before the Pilgrims even arrived.Replies: @John Milton's Ghost, @Emil Nikola Richard, @dearieme, @MEH 0910, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Steve wrote Puritans, not Pilgrims. Co-founded with Cavaliers; it’s not confounding.
“I was a means, through grace assisting me, to stop the flight of those few that then were here with me, and that by my utter denial to go away with them, who would have gone either for England, or mostly for Virginia.”
To be clear, we are talking about a tiny fraction of black ancestry here (usually in the very low single digit percentage).Replies: @BB753, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Source on that? Sounds sus. 🧐
“ blacks as a largely homogeneous people with no history before 1619.”
In reality they left the smallest of footprints until around 1750 or thereabouts. Tracing AA history to a couple of castaways landing in 1619 is preposterous. Before 1713, the pop. of present day 13 colonies was almost 100% natives and Europeans. And it wasn’t until 1750 that blacks came to make the bare majority of a minority segment of the agriculture sector; plantation agriculture.
I fucked a chick for a few weeks who had previously slept with Bradley Cooper so your gaydar sucks. To be honest you kind of come across as gay yourself. At least you write like a gay person with an aderral prescription.
lol. Did you have sex with her in your red Lamborghini while winning the Cannonball Run, or in your imaginary twelve-decker penthouse on the Upper East Side?
Who has ever heard of a good looking young dude with rich parents fucking attractive white girls. I’m clearly making it up- that never ever happens. Every one is a poor closeted gay like you.Replies: @R.G. Camara
You’re aboslutely right. Gay-looking pretty boy Hollywood actors whose “wives” don’t even attend award shows with them or who give career-making roles to Lada Gaga aren’t to be suspected of being gay. Not even when all their female co-stars call them “really fun” and “besties on set” but yet no rumors of affairs emerge.
Not gay here, folks! (/sarcasm)
The newest Mongolian Yokozuna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGyeIfqOO60
Amongst the immense range of Japanese martial arts budō 武道, thousands of schools and styles, there are some very practical self defence skills, like Tankendō 短剣道, kendo with short swords,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8U5zzx3714Replies: @R.G. Camara
In professional wrestling, its universally agreed by all wrestlers that the toughest living pro wrestler is a retired South Pacific dude named Tonga Fifita, who wrestled under the names of Haku and Meng.
Although never a big star, the exploits about his ability to take all sorts of pain were legendary, inside and outside the ring. Practically every wrestler who’s met or worked with him has some crazy story about him taking pain and laughing that would’ve knocked most guys over.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Tonga_Fifita#Notoriety_and_incidents
He grew up studying sumo, but switched to pro wrestling.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Tonga_Fifita#Early_career
American blacks could migrate en masse to these islands, which are black dominated and largely black-run, where the weather is suited to them and where their culture dominates, and yet they don't do so.
Besides a brief minor migration to Liberia in Africa (which many second generation blacks quickly ran back to America from), American blacks have shunned "back to Africa." Most will argue its because 19th and 20th century "colonialism" ruined them.
Yet the Caribbean offered something closer and fresher and untouched by the Scramble for Africa, and yet blacks from the Caribbean from it to America as much as they can.
I would think blacks would rather love being the biggest, richest, smartest Big Man in a small island. But they'd rather "suffer" under "racism" in America.Replies: @SafeNow, @Ed
I’ve been reading up on Haitian history, and came across a biography on one early president and independence general, a mullatto named Boyer.
During his presidency in the 1820s he was very big on getting Black Americans to come to his country. Even as far back then, Black Americans were in a class among themselves as far as skills in the African diaspora. Boyer sent agents to NYC and Philly to sell Blacks there to migrate to Haiti. Didn’t have much luck in NYC but had some success in Philly. About a hundred or so families eventually migrated to Haiti. They hated it. Labor terms weren’t clear, language was different, local Haitians resented them. Most returned to the USA less than a year later. A few stayed on there’s a small community that still exists in the Dominican Republic (Boyer had invaded and occupied DR during his presidency). They’ve mostly blended in local DR family but a few speak in a 19th century Philly accent, maintain Protestant faith and have English surnames.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/travel/preserving-black-american-history-through-song-in-the-dominican-republic.html
And…where did they go from there? What was their next progression, especially if they are compared to other civilizations (e.g. the “big four”: Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, China)?
In point of fact, when one thinks of the main contribution that Sub-Saharan Africa contributed most to the rest of the world for about the last 2,000 years, one thing stands out: Slaves. Bodies to work the fields (or harems) of the higher civilizations. So one would be amiss to overlook the single most important contribution that Sub-Saharans have indeed contributed to the rest of the world. In other words the Arabs of the 8th/9th centuries, as well as the Spanish and Portuguese of the 14th/15th centuries whether traveling to the edges of the southern Sahara or along the coast of Africa, the one thing that they wanted to get from various Sub-Saharan tribes was…bodies to work their various endeavors. Hardly an equitable trading arrangement among civilizational peers. (“We’ll give you trinkets and stuff for a bunch of bodies to work our harems and sugar plantations”)
As opposed to when they traveled to India, China, etc. where they treated the ancient civilizations as trading equals, peers. (“We’ll trade our iron swords, various foodstuffs, etc for your paper, gunpowder, and do show us how to write out those most interesting Hindi numerals, which can only benefit our business endeavors and everyday lives. Also, do convey our gratitude to the Emperor tucked away in the Forbidden City.”)
Even the accounts of Sub-Saharans as peoples greatly differ from they ways that the Chinese and Indians are described. The former are described in unflattering terms while the latter are described with overall respect as equals.
Some things never seem to change.
I don't always agree with your point of view, but I think you're spot-on with this post.To be honest, I always thought that Albion's Seed sounded more like the title of an Orson Scott Card book than a work of American history. It is, as you say, extremely overrated.
But as to why it's taken seriously, the general idea around the iSteve blog seems to be that white Americans of a White Identitarian bent seek to claim historical and cultural continuity with the Albion immigrant waves as a way to forge a contemporary group identity and bolster their claims to political preference in these lands.
I think it's doubtful that such a thing is even possible anymore, but quite apart from that, it certainly isn't what anybody is actually doing. Do any Americans really think of themselves as English colonists these days? No, that identity is dead and gone. And do the Alt-White type around here actually maintain any sort of continuity with the beliefs of their ancestors? It seems not. Their ancestors were Christian, but the Alt-White tends to laugh at Christianity and glom onto the shallow, unmetaphysical metaphysics of Darwin and Galton. And then there is always the paradox that progressivism was advanced every step of the way by Albionic white men. It was white abolitionists who freed the slaves, white reformers who expanded the franchise to include women, and white judges and legislators who implemented the policies of the Civil Rights era. The Alt-White wants to claim historical continuity with a group of ancestors while at the same time eschewing the beliefs that their ancestors really did hold. They would find support for their stated goals if they turned towards Traditional Christianity (i.e pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism), but there is little strain of that in post-Reformation English history, and almost none in America.
Albion doesn't provide much to hang an identity on. It was always a protest movement made up of people who were leaving an earlier identity.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
Could be, but then it is completely wrong. British colonists who constituted the early, regionally diverse American nation are the thing of the past. That could have been Lincoln’s “Universal Yankee Nation”, but that concept lost its meaning after the 1890s & mass import of cheap labor & Ellis Island Americans.
My opinion is that the American nation did exist until the 1960s/70s, but since then it ceased to have much meaning because blacks are a clearly different people & trying, forcibly, to put them into an imaginary “American” straitjacket is doomed.
Nation is always a sense of historical-cultural identity & collective destiny. Blacks and racial others do not have this with most of white Americans, so I think they are separate peoples (blacks being the most homogeneous group).
Albion shtick can be functional only for Anglophiles & British Americans, but they’re in the minority. It is possible and was a reality decades ago that European Americans retain their ethnic memories, but adopt the essentials of American identity (English language, Western culture & American historical traditions). That would be a normal nation in any meaningful sense.
But a nation comes from “natus”, being born, hence family, interbreeding and race. So- blacks and most other non-Europeans cannot belong to the historical, Euro-English language-Western culture based nation simply because they have a radically different historical experience & don’t interbreed with whites. Those who do- their offspring go into phenotype-culture-identity black American group, which is another “nation”.
White nationalism is, in this context, European-American nationalism. Of course that Americans of Slovak and Italian descent cannot get passionate about their “Saxon ancestors” (because that was not the case). But other real European peoples have a significant “other” component (there are many Germans of French, Polish, Czech..ancestry). Perhaps the greatest German-language 20th author Robert Musil was of Czech ancestry. So what? He was immersed in German culture & identity, without taking seriously myths about Germanic Teutonic mythology & similar silly stuff.
In the same vein, other Euro-Americans can have similar levels of attachment to “Universal Yankee nation”- interesting, but that’s not who we are. We are grafted onto that tree, we are part of that tree- but not the trunk. That is the maximum one can get.
I purposefully omitted Christianity, although Christianity is one of the core elements of the Western culture. Secular & assimilated Jews belong to the American nation insofar they adopt the language, Western culture in its varieties & because they’re white. Those Jews who do not accept Western culture as the norm are not a part of American people, they’re a (white) ethnic minority, like Amish.
As far as other races go- sorry, they can’t be a part of American people because they stick out so visibly they are instantly recognized as being “others”. The same goes for non-Western cultures. There cannot be a Sikh-American, this is absurd.
The same goes for other real nations. Blacks and Muslims cannot be French in any meaningful sense because they don’t, they can’t be a part of that crystallized historical identity whose primary loyalty is hitched to Notre Dame, Joan of Arc, Versailles, Moliere, Lavoisier, Impressionists, Pasteur, … They can be a French minority, but not a part of French people. How could a black from Senegal or a Muslim from Algeria say “we” & seriously mean Notre Dame, Robespierre and Monet?
It’s ludicrous.
The same goes for American non-European races & non-Western cultures (and non-English speaking populations). Current American culture wars, CRT etc. show that.
One can’t base national identity on baseball & imperial measures, it is comical.
To sum it: American people is Euro-phenotype + Western culture + English language + a smattering of characteristic American historical traditions. You move Euro-phenotype, English language, Western culture & its values- and you’ll get a group of peoples with different primary loyalties.
Of course that other races (some Indians/Native Americans, Asians, Mestizos,..) can be absorbed into American people’s phenotype-cultural pool, or at least their descendants. But these are marginal cases.
I've noted the "Ignatius Reilly" type among the alt-right many times in the past. Actually, I knew two "conservative" guys, about ten years apart, who were almost carbon copies of IR, at least in terms of their weight and proudly "eccentric" ideas and mannerisms. Someone I've forgotten described a related type, basing themselves on G. K. Chesterton, with walrus moustaches filled with pub-fare cheese and cracker crumbs that would spew out as they pounded the table or bar top, shouting they'd "stand for no damn'd nonsense!"
For some reason they're usually Catholic, although those guys I knew were a Mormon (who loved Led Zeppelin and taught me the iSteve point that musical taste is determined by what was on the radio when you were 13) and a Jew (the first "neocon" I ever met). The reason is obvious, the Catholic idea that all our problems stem from deviating from the Church's various teachings (what IR calls "insufficient theology and geometry). Today, they're Trad Caths, like E. Michael Jones or Nick Fuentes, pounding the table and demanding a return to good, sound Throne and Altar systems of government.
But it's broader than that, on the alt-right; it's all those guys who thought our Current Problems could only be solved by -- surprise! -- the application, good and hard, of their favorite hobby horse, usually some moribund European beardo-weirdo, like Nietzsche (remember how Spencer would quote him?) Dugin, Evola, Heidegger, etc. Anything but, you know, sitting down and think up a way of solving the problems that 300 million ordinary folks would go along with; because it's not about solving the problem of Jewish control or racial violence, it's about never letting a crisis go to waste, if you can use it to talk about your hobbyhorse.
Not these other guys, though. The serious application of some Olde Europe school of thought to problems in 21st century America requires a total lack of self-awareness or of a sense of humor (the two go together). It's like a heavy metal band adding umlauts to their name (The interviews in Spinal Tap could be any number of alt-right podcasts).
Think of Spencer's monologue on his favorite hamburger: buffoon, not clown. "What's so funny?" Steve Bannon still tries to work both the Dugin and Catholic angles, despite the former being an ex-Satanist and Third Rome fanatic. He actually has a pretty good sense of humor, though.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Dieter Kief, @Emil Nikola Richard
Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces constantly reflects about himself and – about making a fool of himself! So he clearly knows in lots of (maybe not in all!) cases what impression his actions make on others. John Kennedy Toole was a teacher, his students loved and adored him, not least because he – every once in a while – (intentionally) palyed the mad man (= made fun of himself not least) in front of the class. A Fool in Christ – that’s what both men are: John Kennedy Toole no less than the main character Ignatius Reilly in his novel.
The reason neither Reilly nor Toole did manage to be adored by the alt-right at all as far as I found out so far is the following: The self-reflective weakness that irony, when spotted in painfull/ humorous reflections of one’s self/ oneself not least – necessarily carries with it. This existential twilight is no favored alt-right territory. – Igantius Reilly’s mind is twofold (Hegel) and thusly embodies the very soul of the modern man: To be Torn and Frayed (Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street (my italics). And that is, hhhe, ca. 10 000 lightyears away from the alt-right old fashioned self-righteousness and stubbornness you describe (and – rightfully, I want to say, make fun of).
Now: One could always heed the suspicion that Toole/Reilly’s irony in the name of God could not be of the real (or: pure!) kind. Or would be a contradictio in adjecto even. – This would be the radical or: pure (=utterly principled = hyper-protestant, mega-rational) take on Toole/ Reilly and my impression is that this misconception of them is widespread. But this take, I’d hold, reveals more about the – however implicit or explicit – protestant/modern presuppositions than about the playful and soul liberating fun this novel embodies.
Protestant stiffness of the hips makes protestants a bit prone to negate such existential subtleties and artsy widenings of our understanding of (not only) the social reality. The alt-right might not least suffer from such a restricted modern way of thinking. Its true though: The whole-hearted refutation of everything two-folded and undecided and deeply foolish lies then right around the corner.
In short: It all depends whether one is willing to accept that people can feel safely in God’s hand and still be deeply human – while making fun of themselves – and of others. –
This somemthing about the glorious Confederacy of Dunces, that the snowflakes and the woke don’t get either, of couse.
H. Vernon Leighton in his Confederacy essay I’ve linked above, puts that this way:
“Toole clearly understood the Boethian idea that an apparently malevolent, worldly Fortune could be under the control of Destiny, the temporal agent of God’s beneficent Providence.”
– This understanding I think is the foundation of the Confederacy and it also hints at a form of liberty/ honored individuality outside the norms of everyday life. As I said: I know that this Fool in Christ menatlity can always be revealed as self-contradictory. Or criticised as a justification of a narrow religious worldview (or: a metaphysical illusion). Yeah, yeah, yeah! You can do that and people do it. –
– But then, there is this defense of the A Confederacy of Dunces: Namely that lots of readers laughed till tears came / Out of their ears, while reading it. – I know, that the deeply principled fundamentalist modernist and woke counter-argument even at this point could always be: Ok, those readers laughed – but they laughed in a pre-enlightened (=REPRESSIVE/ self-denigrating..) mindframe, which shows in gross clarity, that their laughter was futile (Ha-ha Said the Clown/ Yardbirds).
The scene I mentioned above, in which Igantius Reilly dances – even though, as he tells us a) he does not want to and b) he does not know how to – is not least that: An imitation of the Fool in Christ as embodied in a classical manner by Simeon of Emesa. The Lexicon of All Saints knows about this man, that he acted foolishly in public as a masquerade to get through to the simple minded ones. And that is exactly what Ignatius Reilly did want to achieve in this scene – as he – repeatedly even – tells the readers: To reach simple minded black womenfolk. Now: To achieve his goal to reach the simple minded ones Simeon of Emesa too, the prototypical Fool in Christ – danced, jumped (the Stones again!), slouched, staggered… – verbatim as Ignatius Reilly told us, that he too – did. Until the end, when he – as I said: Christ is at play here too: Had to suffer and tumble and – fall even – before being – resurrected by his delighted audience…
Cavaliers are old stock whites. And yes for the Cavaliers* and no for the Scotch-Irish: https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5
*Although the Cavaliers dominated the coastal upper South (Tidewater), bulk of the population in the region was of humbler backgrounds, i.e. poor farmers, sharecroppers, and indentured servants.
“Better ceramics, seafood, and cartoons”? Do you get your ideas about Japan from 1980’s movies?
As for sports, I find Judo, wrestling, and gymnastics to be more interesting than basketball, but YMMV.
West Virginia whites have some of the highest fractions of European ancestry in the U.S. while West Virginia blacks have the lowest fraction of African ancestry among the self-identified blacks in the country.
As for sports, I find Judo, wrestling, and gymnastics to be more interesting than basketball, but YMMV.Replies: @SFG
Honestly, I was mostly trying to make an anime joke. You know how much dissident rightists like anime.
I don’t know that “A _____ of _____” is such a unique idea that it must be stolen. Even “A [political term] of [negative noun]” isn’t so unique.
So when I want 200 proof alcohol (not the denatured stuff which contains poison, otherwise known as laquer thinner) to make hash oil in my kitchen (to give away to friends at Christmas, I'm not a big fan of the stuff), I go to Baja California where they sell pure 200 proof alcohol made from sugar cane. There is no way I could even take a sip of that nasty liquor. It's only good for practical purposes rather than consumption.
Speaking of Mexican liquor, lately I've been fascinated by raicilla, otherwise known as Mexican moonshine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raicilla
I'm going to try and bring a bottle home from Tijuana this weekend if I can find it, because it's too damn expensive in the US. As a tequila and mezcal aficionado, I absolutely must find out what it tastes like.Replies: @Jack D
You can’t get much above 191 proof thru distillation because at that point the alcohol-water mixture forms an “azeotrope” – its boiling point is the same as pure alcohol. To get the last little bit of water out you have to dehydrate the alcohol by other means. Some of those means are toxic or contribute a bad taste so it’s hard to find food grade alcohol that is 200 proof. I suppose for some process where the alcohol gets boiled off anyway it should make no difference but I would stick to food grade products unless your reaction absolutely demands anhydrous alcohol.
As an aside, of the operations I observed (via a friend with family in southwest Virginia), their entire production was sold to black club owners in Baltimore, Prince George's county in Maryland, Richmond, and the Norfolk/Newport News area. The club owners "cut" higher quality whiskey with it and sell it to drunk revelers that can't tell the difference or that use enough mixer the taste is hidden. I can't imagine anyone drinking it by choice.
350+ years of family history in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky means you learn something about moonshine just by osmosis.As I said before, virtually all moonshine today (in the US) is made from sugar - not sugar derived from corn, but from big bags of sugar. One of the difficulties in running a modern moonshine operation is how to buy large amounts of sugar (hundreds of pounds at a time) without attracting attention. Whatever you sampled that was bought at a liquor store was not real moonshine.
Joseph Dabney's "Mountain Spirits: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James' Ulster Plantation to America's Appalachians and the Moonshine Life" is good for the history and traditions of the subject, while Alec Wilkinson's "Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor" is good on the business and law enforcement aspects.Replies: @kaganovitch, @petit bourgeois, @Jack D
You could argue the other way and say that the modern stuff made from sugar is not really “moonshine” because moonshine refers to corn liquor (see Dabney’s title).
Any time you are dealing with an illegal product, quality control goes out the door – you’re dealing with criminals to begin with and there are no government inspectors to enforce purity. Even back in the day, moonshine would often have lead in it because they would reuse old car radiators and other things with lead in them and they wouldn’t discard the “heads” and “tails” which contain methanol and fusel oils and other undesirable stuff. But there are better criminals and worse criminals.
Speaking of sugar, the USSR had its own tradition of untaxed alcohol called “samagon”. When I was in Ukraine (long before the current war) supermarkets sold 50 lb. sacks of sugar and I don’t think it was for making jam.
Kennett says:
Mattel reaching around a new demographic, so must be getting desperate to top Barbie pegging Ken.
I've read the same thing about the Irish Gypsies/Tinkers/Travelers, who with a whistle could command their string of ponies to follow them home after market day.Replies: @dearieme
But only if the ponies belong to someone else.
Yo, one can include David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, of special interest as of June, 2022 because inflation.
I guess the “I did not know that!” aspect to The Great Wave is that it is a counter to Milton Friedman’s “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”
Fischer describes long periods in Western History of prosperity and stable prices, punctuated by price revolutions, periods of vigorous inflation.
Fischer’s thesis is similar to the questions about whether wearing masks do anything about COVID — are masks a virtue-signaling, ineffective response as shown by the regions with mask mandates doing worse than ones without? Or are mask mandates a response to worsening COVID rates in the more densely populated regions, where the case rate would be even worse without the masks?
Yeah, yeah, Milton Friedman remains in charge as we are seeing, but do the governmental authorities expand the currency simply because they are Leftists who want to Build Back Better or Fundamentally Transform Society, or is expanding the currency a futile reaction to outside events such as crop failure, long-term drought or exhaustion of critical resources?
In other words, what makes prices stable for long periods of time — are Austrian School economists running the show for whatever reason? Given the temptation to debasing the currency, what explains the historical periods where inflation wasn’t even at 2%, it was non-existent?
Where Fischer’s arguments collapse is his prescription for fighting price revolutions when they “just happen as a result of exogenous factors, and manipulations of currency are a symptom and not a cause.” His last chapter argues for wage-and-price controls, which have never, ever worked, anywhere and at any time in history.
The dude just got through explaining that “price revolutions” a.k.a. inflation just “happens” and there is not much one can do about it because it is driven by deep, historically driven forces, and then he turns on a dime and offers the Leftie prescription of price controls as scientifically informed action, when there is absolutely no historical or other evidence of something so deeply fighting human nature, has ever worked or can ever work.
Don’t know if the world is getting dumber, but Professor Fischer seems to be rather intellectually disabled himself.
You sound jealous. But shouldn’t you be jealous of her not me. She’s the one that fucked Bradley Cooper- whom you are obviously crushing hard on.
Who has ever heard of a good looking young dude with rich parents fucking attractive white girls. I’m clearly making it up- that never ever happens. Every one is a poor closeted gay like you.
Its ok, baby, just come out of the closet. Bradley will still love you just as much after you do.
After all, its Pride month!
It’s very common throughout the world (and especially in the past where the poor especially got most of their calories from bread or porridge) for there to be prestige grains or starches that the richer people eat (which tend to be slightly harder to grow) and less prestigious/ cheaper ones that are eaten mainly or entirely by animals (cows, horses, etc.) , such that if a human is eating them he is either rather strange or really poor.
In the US for example, until recent decades the soybean was not considered to be human food, although it has been eaten as people food in Asia for millennia.
In France, corn in any form was not a normal item in the human diet. Humans ate wheat (bread). If maize was grown at all, it was as cattle food. Seeing humans eat the stuff would have seemed to a 19th century Frenchman like you would see someone sitting down to eat a plate of hay.
Isn't that true in the literal sense though? weren't pre-colonial blacks literally prehistoric?Replies: @James N. Kennett
Until they were evangelized or conquered by Christians and Muslims, and with the exception of the North-East, pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africans were literally in the Iron Age.
Even the Iron Age was a late arrival, nearly a thousand years later than in the Near East and Europe: much of Africa was isolated from the rest of the world before camels were introduced to the Sahara Desert around 2,000 years ago.
I've noted the "Ignatius Reilly" type among the alt-right many times in the past. Actually, I knew two "conservative" guys, about ten years apart, who were almost carbon copies of IR, at least in terms of their weight and proudly "eccentric" ideas and mannerisms. Someone I've forgotten described a related type, basing themselves on G. K. Chesterton, with walrus moustaches filled with pub-fare cheese and cracker crumbs that would spew out as they pounded the table or bar top, shouting they'd "stand for no damn'd nonsense!"
For some reason they're usually Catholic, although those guys I knew were a Mormon (who loved Led Zeppelin and taught me the iSteve point that musical taste is determined by what was on the radio when you were 13) and a Jew (the first "neocon" I ever met). The reason is obvious, the Catholic idea that all our problems stem from deviating from the Church's various teachings (what IR calls "insufficient theology and geometry). Today, they're Trad Caths, like E. Michael Jones or Nick Fuentes, pounding the table and demanding a return to good, sound Throne and Altar systems of government.
But it's broader than that, on the alt-right; it's all those guys who thought our Current Problems could only be solved by -- surprise! -- the application, good and hard, of their favorite hobby horse, usually some moribund European beardo-weirdo, like Nietzsche (remember how Spencer would quote him?) Dugin, Evola, Heidegger, etc. Anything but, you know, sitting down and think up a way of solving the problems that 300 million ordinary folks would go along with; because it's not about solving the problem of Jewish control or racial violence, it's about never letting a crisis go to waste, if you can use it to talk about your hobbyhorse.
Not these other guys, though. The serious application of some Olde Europe school of thought to problems in 21st century America requires a total lack of self-awareness or of a sense of humor (the two go together). It's like a heavy metal band adding umlauts to their name (The interviews in Spinal Tap could be any number of alt-right podcasts).
Think of Spencer's monologue on his favorite hamburger: buffoon, not clown. "What's so funny?" Steve Bannon still tries to work both the Dugin and Catholic angles, despite the former being an ex-Satanist and Third Rome fanatic. He actually has a pretty good sense of humor, though.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Dieter Kief, @Emil Nikola Richard
Ignatius Riley is a New Orleanian. And he is not a six sigma guy. Maybe around one sigma. Here are a couple of peculiarities which might help to inform you.
New Orleans women talk to their mom on the phone 5-9 times a day every single day.
New Orleans is the only place in the world I have been where people will sit around the table at lunch and spend a third of the meal conversation on what they should do for dinner. You might find this unappetizing. I find it unappetizing. They consider this normal.
Maybe a half of a sigma. Absolutely not two.
I had a (ex)friend who ranted on and on about “white racism.” BTW he was a college professor, of geography in particular. Blacks are “equal, equal,” he claimed.
Once I asked him about the IQ difference. He acknowledged whites have higher IQs as a group. But he had this rejoinder–“I’ve known white people who were stupid and blacks who were smart.”
His theme was that if you can find a black individual who was smarter than a white individual, higher white average IQ doesn’t matter. A convoluted reasoning, but leftists go to any length.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
List of fallacies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy
..........................
Who has ever heard of a good looking young dude with rich parents fucking attractive white girls. I’m clearly making it up- that never ever happens. Every one is a poor closeted gay like you.Replies: @R.G. Camara
lol. So you’re a closeted gay man making up stories about being a “a good looking young dude with rich parents fucking attractive white girls”, both to hide your closeted gayness and protect your gay icon, Bradley Cooper.
Its ok, baby, just come out of the closet. Bradley will still love you just as much after you do.
After all, its Pride month!
So much about the level of discourse …
Once I asked him about the IQ difference. He acknowledged whites have higher IQs as a group. But he had this rejoinder--"I've known white people who were stupid and blacks who were smart."
His theme was that if you can find a black individual who was smarter than a white individual, higher white average IQ doesn't matter. A convoluted reasoning, but leftists go to any length.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
Therapy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
List of fallacies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy
……………………..
He’s got a great imagination, tho. Especially for a closeted gay man.
One of my former boss’s indirect ancestors was known by his neighbors to be impregnating his slaves and selling the children. He was eventually murdered–and no one did anything about it, they figured he deserved it. They were Germans, originally from the Palatinate, and pioneer whites in central NC, about 1740.
Plenty of Scots-Irish owned slaves, Andrew Jackson being the most famous, but they didn’t own the huge, 17-18th century plantations on the coastal plain where most of them were imported.
Doesn’t Singapore have price controls that work reasonably well? Its government passed the Price Control Act in 1950, which has been amended numerous times since (as recently as 2020), but is still in effect.
A specifically African identity long predates the Great Migration and goes back to Revolutionary War times. Many important black figures from the 19th century looked back to pre-colonial Africa (and especially to ancient Egypt) for their self-understanding and identity. Examples: John Marrant (who believed the Garden of Eden had been located in Ethiopia), Prince Hall, Richard Allen (the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), Hosea Easton, Martin Delany, and many others. Prince Hall Masonry, which incorporated many Egyptian elements in its mythology, was especially influential in this regard (and of whom many key figures were members such as the aforementioned Allen and Delany, as well as Henry Highland Garnet and David Walker).
I think this makes some sense if you think about it: black Americans would have lost their tribal identities within a couple generation, and it is unlikely they would have looked on European civilization as their heritage. However, for most of the figures listed above, Christianity was central and so this would have generated some feeling of comity with whites as well as some sense of belonging to European civilization in perhaps a partial way. Their appeal to a mythical African past was not typically used as way to denigrate European civilization, but simply as theirs. When society came to reject Christianity and to judge Western civilization as irredeemably wicked and oppressive, this comity would have been lost, and American black ‘Africanism’ became more radical, more hostile, and more aggressive. That’s at least my guess.
Spoken like a true Celt!