Keating wrote: ↑
This is a problem that has been building for a long time. In many ways it’s the same question the Reformation was about. Ultimately, it comes down to culture being the most important thing for a functioning society. It’s unfortunate that race is a coarse proxy for culture, but that doesn’t stop it being an obvious truth. It’s not the whole story, though. Technological inventions like television have had a proven cause on withdrawing people from public spaces and interaction. The internet, particularly social media, has exploded the problem. Western liberal democracies’ power relied on a population with high trust. We know fewer interactions with others decreases trust. We also know ethnic diversity can also erode trust. I think the problems we’re seeing today are a result of the social capital the West built up being eroded to almost nothing.
There’s two things that scare me because they might be true: Some aspects of culture have a biological component. That is genes that adapt humans to certain environments may also make them less likely to work well in Western liberal democracies. The second is that this might be an inherent problem with liberal democracies. They always degrade into dictatorships, because they contain the seed of their own destruction in allowing the culture to drift away from supporting them (effectively Socrates’ warning).
Some aspects of cultures
DEFINITELY have a genetic component. (Note to the easily triggered: this is a neuroscience paper, not Stormfront).
Genes and culture are often thought of as opposite ends of the nature–nurture spectrum, but here we examine possible interactions. Genetic association studies suggest that variation within the genes of central neurotransmitter systems, particularly the serotonin (5-HTTLPR, MAOA-uVNTR) and opioid (OPRM1 A118G), are associated with individual differences in social sensitivity, which reflects the degree of emotional responsivity to social events and experiences. Here, we review recent work that has demonstrated a robust cross-national correlation between the relative frequency of variants in these genes and the relative degree of individualism–collectivism in each population, suggesting that collectivism may have developed and persisted in populations with a high proportion of putative social sensitivity alleles because it was more compatible with such groups. Consistent with this notion, there was a correlation between the relative proportion of these alleles and lifetime prevalence of major depression across nations. The relationship between allele frequency and depression was partially mediated by individualism–collectivism, suggesting that reduced levels of depression in populations with a high proportion of social sensitivity alleles is due to greater collectivism. These results indicate that genetic variation may interact with ecological and social factors to influence psychocultural differences.
Emotional responsitivity, social sensistivity, depression, collectivism, are all biologically-influenced traits which have DEEP influences on culture. Of course they have some degree of environmental variation, and actually trying to tell apart environment from genes is a fool's errand, but at least PART of the DIFFERENCES between cultures is due to DIFFERENCES between genes. This happens on a spectrum of variations on polygenetic and environmental traits and it's not as simple as "you have gene X, so you're an Y", but in LARGE NUMBERS differences in DISTRIBUTIONS of polygenetic traits matter.
They're not the ONLY factor in cultural differences, and they're not perfect one-to-one correspondences, but they matter. Cultures aren't free floating instructions from the Hyperuranion. They're ways that people behave. Part of the differences in our behavior is due to differences in genes (leaving aside races it's easy for everyone to see differences in small children in terms of character, intelligence, behavior) part of those differences is due to peer pressure, part is due to instruction, part to random people you meet and find charismatic, part due to accidents, part to brain development, etc.
But on a large scale the random factors tend to negate each other, and only the directional ones (genes, peer pressure, instructions, social codes) matter. And they're not malleable beyond a certain point. How much you can change with external pressure is hard to tell on an individual level, and even at a group level, but you can't change COMPLETELY. Non-changeable differences matter and influence politics, economics, rates of crimes, etc.
Also liberal democracies inevitably degenerate into identitarian struggles in multicultural societies. As
Lee Yaun Kew, the Eternal Prime Minister of Singapore, put it:
n multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I'd run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese. I would have a constant clash in my Parliament which cannot be resolved because the Chinese majority would always overrule them.
This is true in the US, too. Black people overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and now that they're an electoral force to be reckoned with Latinos are getting there too. Same for Asians. While White Evangelicals and Mormons overwhelmingly vote for Republicans, and under Trump the white working class of the Rust Belt is perceiving itself as a block of voters, and has turned to the GOP. Jews have gone full Democrat.
Things aren't going to get any better. More Latinos coming in mean more Democrats elected by Latinos, and more Latino-friendly policies. Latinos want "free gibs", just like Blacks, and they know that the Dems will deliver them, ESPECIALLY so if it's an Ocasio! or a Keith Ellison or Kamala Harris calling the shots. The alliance between Latinos and Blacks is shaky, but as long as there are whites to bash it'll hold. On the other hand the GOP is the Party of White People, especially under Trump. Polarization is inevitable.
And make no mistake, if the Dems win, White People eventually ARE going to
pay reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates is the future of the Democratic Party. Latinos will likely join in, and clamor for reparations as well, probably in the form of "free gibs" and massive Affirmative Action, but maybe even in concrete cash through taxes on Whites.
Also if the Dems win Black Lives Matter will get a say in police reform. People like Shaun King will demand the end of stop and frisk and pulling back the po-po, even though there is
evidence that the "Ferguson effect" is real (note: this the Guardian, a leftist paper, not Stormfront):
Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri St Louis and the chair of a National Academy of Sciences roundtable on crime trends, said the Brennan Center’s focus on the economic roots of violence was not enough to explain “why homicide increased as much as it did in these cities in a one-year period”.
“The conclusion one draws from the Brennan Center’s report is, ‘Not much changed,’ and that is simply not true. In the case of homicide, a lot did change, in a very short period of time,” he said.
While “economic disadvantage is an extraordinarily important predictor of the level of homicide in cities,” he said, “there’s no evidence of a one year substantial economic decline in those cities. There have to be other factors involved.”
The idea of a “Ferguson effect” was coined in 2014 by St Louis police chief Samuel Dotson. The same year that Ferguson saw massive protests over the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, St Louis saw a 32.5% increase in homicides. “The criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment,” St Louis’s police chief argued, blaming the increase in crime on what he called “the Ferguson effect”, and arguing that the police department needed to hire 180 more officers.
When Rosenfeld analyzed St Louis’s crime data, he found the increase in homicides there could not have been caused by a “Ferguson effect”, because the greatest increase came early in the year, months before Michael Brown’s death or the protests that followed.
Rosenfeld’s research was widely cited in articles debunking the Ferguson effect.
But that paper only looked at the evidence for the effect in one city. With funding from the National Institute of Justice, the justice department’s research arm, Rosenfeld did a new study early this year that looked that more broadly at homicide trends in the nation’s 56 largest cities and found an overall 17% increase in homicide.
As a result of that broader national analysis he said, he has had “second thoughts” about the Ferguson effect. “My views have been altered.”
Looking at the additional homicides in large cities, he found that two-thirds of the increase was concentrated in 10 cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Washington, Nashville, Philadelphia, Kansas City and St Louis.
Those 10 cities had somewhat higher levels of poverty than the other cities he examined. But, he said, the “key difference” was that “their African American population was substantially larger than other large cities”: an average of 41% in those 10 cities, compared with 19.9% in the others.
Now if you're a shitlib you're probably creaming your pants at the thought of paying taxes to atone for your guilt, the effects on the economy be damned, and you're ecstatic about ending police patrols in black-heavy areas, even though the police presence saves much more Black Lives (and hey, White Lives and Latino and Asian Lives, Which Matter TOO) than the morons of BLM.
But if you're even a teensy bit skeptical of the Great Social Justice Utopia you should be taking some time to digest the implications of the Democratic Party turning into the party of All the Non Whites United Against White Supremacist Demons. Or of the GOP becoming the White Party, for that matter. That's pretty scary too.
But I'm just a "racist dog", so I'm probably 100% forever wrong, and polarization will only lead to Peace and Prosperity and Socialist Unicorns.