The Blind Leading the Blind, Part II

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We have considered Detroit's demise in light of Afros' seeming inability to capably take over the reins of Euro-created government, be it in Port-au-Prince, Johannesburg, or Birmingham.

But it takes two to tango.  Inept city leaders can do harm, but an inept population can double the damage.  Consider Orange County's surprise bankruptcy in 1994. Referendum-loving Californians having made it nearly impossible for local government to raise taxes, county treasurer Bob Citron began to invest what little they could raise into ever-riskier securities.  November 1994: The bomb dropped, with $1.7 billion up in smoke, also known as Citron's Barings Bank moment.

Or see New York City's famous near-bankruptcy in 1975 ('Ford to City: Drop Dead'), when the Big Apple was humiliatingly taken over by New York State.  In addition to the oil shock, stubborn unions, and shoddy bookkeeping, the city had recently seen a sudden flight of net taxpayers and an inflow of the government-dependent:

The 1970s saw New York lose more than 800,000 residents, almost all of them non-Hispanic whites.  This was the first significant population decrease in more than 150 years.
      

Residents with household incomes below federal poverty standards increased by 25 percent from 1970 to 1980, while all other income groups diminished in number.  Whereas the number of impoverished white residents decreased by 12 percent, the number of poor blacks increased by 40 percent, and poor Hispanics by 52 percent.

Rona Stein opines that

There is some evidence that New York City and other industrial regions may have unintentionally encouraged the poor to move in by offering relatively generous levels of welfare benefits. 

Perhaps, but the post-war boom that had made sure everyone who wanted a job had one was already waning in the 1960s.  Afro-Americans were now, as they had been after the Civil War, thrown into sudden competition with other ethnies.  W.H. Collins in 1918 had bemoaned the newly freed blacks' reticence to work, predicting:

The Blind Leading the Blind

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Detroit, the largest city in Michigan, is about to join its sisters Flint, Pontiac, Benton Harbor, and Ecorse in being stripped of its municipal authority and ceded to an 'emergency manager.' Well-covered by commentators who can see, the story has also attracted observations such as:

“How come all of the jurisdictions put under emergency management are majority African American? Has anybody noticed that?” asked Rep. John Conyers (D), who has represented Detroit for 47 years.

How come indeed.

As Congressman Conyers implies, majority-Afro cities tend to elect majority-Afro city governments.  As the average Afro is less well-endowed than other ethnies in future-time orientation, commonweal-orientation, industriousness, and logical aptitude, majority-Afro governments tend to govern poorly.

.             .            .

Haiti, the world's first Black Republic, stunned the planet in 1804 by driving out her European masters and embarking upon true self-government.  A century later, adventurer and journalist Hesketh Prichard ambled from one end of the island to the other, to report on what one hundred years of freedom had wrought.

On the capital city:

A German by Any Other Name...

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The Maastricht treaty, indeed the whole idea of the E.U., is based on the principle that 'People are people.' Also known as the Late Twentieth Century Delusion.  As we have seen, the Think-Tankers who cook up international policy are in utter thrall to it.  No reason, say they, why a semiconductor industry such as flourishes in Japan couldn't do the same in Angola.  No reason at all.  All that's missing are the right incentives, the right institutions, the right...

...Shhh. Don't say 'people.' Crimethink.

It has become obvious that the Eurozone will survive in present form only if the Germans keep paying the debts of the Greeks.  Talk of new 'institutions' and 'treaties and 'incentives' is silly.  The incentives and treaties and institutions have been in place for ten years; they have not yet been able to turn Greeks into Germans.  Nor will they.

Why not?  What makes a German a German, and a Greek a Greek?  Couldn't we switch out the populations of these two countries and just assume that Greek-Germany and German-Greece would continue to function as they always have?

*               *               *

Though it has become terribly unfashionable, there is little as satisfying as reading old-time authors' stout observations of other peoples, untouched by today's feminized hive-mind and its cries to not hurt anyone's feelings.  It was once taken for granted that a German was not a Greek.  Would today's Eurozone decision-makers come back to this distant wisdom, they might yet come up with some policy worth the name.

So-- a 2012 currency zone containing both a Germany and a Greece will not function, and we need writers from before the Wars to give us a hint as to why:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

 

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Ghost in the Machine?

(from the archives...)

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'Hope springs eternal.'

Truer words were never spoken of the inner workings of the Human Mind.

Polite fictions get us through the day.

'I'm still attracted to my spouse.'

'I enjoy my job.'

'I love all my children equally.'

'I'm special.'

We tell polite fictions to our children.

'With hard work, you can be anything you want to be.'

'You'll find true love.  There's someone for everyone.'

'When you die, you go... to a nice place.'

And so forth.

Our Crimes, Ourselves, Part II

As we have seen, white people's criminality has varied greatly over time and space.  W.A. Bonger in the 1940s walked us through Jewish, Mediterranean, Alpine, Nordic, Ugro-Finn, and Dinaric (Slavic) crime rates from his time period.  Such differences, we've argued, are nothing to wring one's hands over, but a simple reality for policy-makers to take into account.

Similarly, for as long as Africans and Europeans have co-existed on North American soil, these two admittedly large and diverse groups have, in the aggregate, shown markedly different criminal tendencies.  The differences seem to be getting more and more marked, and it has become conservative dogma that post-1960s Great Society programs are to blame.

This is true to a point.  As we've seen, any human can be incentivized to be parasitic, be he the son of West Africans or Albion's seed.

But long before public welfare handouts were even a twinkle in LBJ's eye, Afros and Euros committed crime differently in America.  How differently?

Our Crimes, Ourselves

Part of the Late Twentieth Century Delusion is an aggressive (but selective) blank-slatism that assumes each ethnic / gender group should show up in prisons, universities, and space shuttle missions in precise proportion to its percentage in the general population. (The U.S.'s billion-dollar sports industry excepted.)

Prisons in particular have vexed affirmative-action policy-makers, as they stubbornly refuse to fill up with 72% Euros, 12% Afros, 12% Hispanics, and 4% Asians (to say nothing of 50% male / 50% female).  In more sensible times, social scientists noticed that different groups committed different amounts and types of crimes, and imagined possible reasons why.

"Non-hispanic white", that U.S. Census monolith, is itself a racial stew whose components have long fascinated ethnographers.  Dutch sociologist W.A. Bonger combed through a great many studies on ethnic European criminality and presented his findings in the 1943 tome Race and Crime.  Clearly ill at ease with the determinist worldview and openly derisive of German race science, Bonger was still a man of his age, allowing himself speculations on ethnicity that would ban him from today's academia.  (To say nothing of the title of his book.)

What did he find?

Provisioning...or Mating?

Morality or Biology?  Those engaged in the culture wars tend to focus on the first; those combing through the genome, the second.  In 'Paternal Provisioning versus Mate Seeking in Human Populations,' Edward M. Miller offers us tantalizing insight into the why of some of our African brethren's puzzling behavior.  An exercise of historical interest, perhaps, to compare his conclusions with the anthropological observations of those who've gone before us.   

Says Miller [all emphasis ours]:

'In some species, males devote more effort to seeking mating opportunities. In other species, they devote more effort to assisting their offspring. In each species, males evolve to use the strategy that most promotes their fitness.

'[...] In warm climates, females typically can gather enough food for themselves and their children. In cold climates, hunting is required to survive winter, and females typically do not hunt (other than for easily captured small game). Hence, offspring survival requires male provisioning in cold climates. Thus, cold climate males were selected to devote more efforts to provisioning, and less to seeking matings. In warm climates, such male provisioning was not essential, even if desirable.'