Though it’s September, and time to get back to business around here, I haven’t had enough quiet time over the past few days to do any serious writing. (Though you may find it hard to believe, it actually takes me rather a long time to produce a substantial post — and then there’s coming up with a title once the thing’s done.)
There’s certainly no shortage of topics, even if we confine ourselves to current events: the slow death of Hillary Clinton’s political prospects, the surging popularity of Donald Trump, the rapid intensification of what John Derbyshire calls our “cold civil war” (including the recent rash of murdered police officers), and President Obama’s latest efforts to cast global-warming skeptics in the role of Emmanuel Goldstein, to name but a few.
Looming above them all, though, is the drowning of Europe in a (so far) irresistible flood of alien migrants, which is what I’d most like to comment on, as soon as I have a chance. Europe is suddenly realizing, far too late, that it faces a mortal threat, and it has no idea what to do. (This is probably because the only thing it can do, if it wishes to have any hope of survival as a civilization, is still unthinkable (or at least unsayable) to most European people, and to nearly all of its political and academic elites.)
For tonight, though, just a link — this time to a rather more demanding item than usual. If you take the trouble to read it, I think you will find it worth the effort: a systematic analysis of the genetic and evolutionary implications of mass immigration, by Frank Salter.
Here’s the abstract:
Analyses of the costs and benefits of immigration have not considered the dependence of an ethny’s reproductive fitness on its monopoly of a demarcated territory. Global assays of human genetic variation allow estimation of the genetic losses incurred by a member of a population when random fellow ethnics are replaced by immigrants from different ethnies. This potential loss defines an individual’s ethnic genetic interest as a quantity that varies with the genetic distance of potential immigrants. W. D. Hamilton showed that self-sacrificial altruism is adaptive when it preserves the genetic interests of a population of genetically similar individuals. Ethnic genetic interest can be so large that altruism on behalf of one’s ethny”””˜ethnic nepotism’””can be adaptive when it prevents replacement. It follows that ethnies usually have an interest in securing and maintaining a monopoly over a demarcated territory, an idea consonant with the universal nationalism of Bismarck and Woodrow Wilson.
Read the whole thing here.
27 Comments
http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2015/09/vee-haf-vays-of-making-you-take-more-immigrants.html
I am pleased to see that my US publicity agent, ‘JK’, is working hard for his bonus!
My original post on this subject was not exactly enlightening but your readers might find the ensuing comments of interest particularly those from ‘SoD’ (Son of Duff who is “a very naughty boy” for disagreeing with his dear old Dad! I may have to alter my Will and leave my overdraft elsewhere!)
For a very much more intelligent and perceptive view of the current mass immigration I would urge you all to read Fraser Nelson (Ed. of The Spectator) over at The Coffee House:
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/09/increasing-wealth-is-the-cause-of-the-great-migration-not-a-cure-for-it/
But & Just for Context
http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2015/09/vee-haf-vays-of-making-you-take-more-immigrants.html
***
http://malcolmpollack.com/2012/07/28/drool-britannia/
And Not to Outdo Hisself
http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2015/09/well-i-asked-for-it-now-ive-got-it.html
I assume the citizens of Western Europe will sit by and watch their futures vanish down the rat hole of Islam?
It is hard to understand how the person who consistently leads all of her potential challengers is undergoing “political death.” If anyone is experiencing political death, it would be Christie, Jindal, Perry, Walker, and Rand Paul.
While the bombastic and narcissistic Trump has the support of about a third of Republicans, this is a minority of a minority. Pretty much everyone else regards him as the bellicose and angry demagogue that he is, as he is saddled with huge unfavorability ratings among both Republicans and Democrats.. (A recent poll reports that the majority of Republicans believe that President Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, while 40% believe that Ted Cruz was born in America. I believe the term for this is “low information voters.”)
There is no “recent rash of murdered police officers.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/09/03/scott-walker-couldnt-be-more-wrong-about-the-threat-to-police-officers/
As for Obama’s condescension towards science denialists: you might as well try tor reason with people who believe that five is a greater number than twelve.
* * * *
When the Irish and the Scots fled famine, America took them in. When Jews fled pogroms, we took them in. We took in Chinese fleeing communism, Cambodians fleeing Pol Pot, and Russians fleeing Bolsheviks. We take in Latinos fleeing gang violence in Honduras and Guatemala. We took in my grandparents, your parents, and you.
This generosity and tolerance brought social conflict and upheaval. At one point in American history, most people in jail were Irish. (Ever wonder about the provenance of the term “paddy wagon?”) The Italians and Russians brought organized crime, and the Jews lived in squalid tenements and were an enormous burden on the cities they fled to. (A happy exception to this is Muslim immigrants. California is chock full of Iranians who fled after the fall of the Shah, and it is harder to imagine a more hard-working, law-abiding group of people.) Over the time, the nativists were consistently proven wrong, and each successive wave of immigrants contributed to making America the strongest and wealthiest country on the planet.
Thousands of people are literally fleeing Syria for their lives, and Europe has a binary choice: let them in or let them die. After months of dithering, the photo of a three year old boy lying head down on a beach shocked the world’s conscience, and European countries — belatedly — are doing the right thing.
We will all be judged some day. Europe will forever be shamed from standing by while Hitler rounded up what Churchill referred to as “Hebrew bloodsuckers” and sent them to die. I am sure that this is part of Angela Merkel’s thinking. Those who show mercy and compassion towards those who are in desperate straits will be judged much more favorably than those who despise them for having a different skin color, a different religion, and a different language, and consign them to their fate. Few people will be judged more harshly than those who live in comfort and affluence, and ignore the desperate pleas of those who want nothing more than to save their lives and their children’s lives.
Peter, if you want to pretend that all’s right in Hillary’s world (and by extension yours), be my guest. I’ve already put my money where my mouth is, and when the Democrats nominate someone else next summer you can send me my bottle of whisky, according to the terms of our wager.
I will say, though, that I spend a lot of time with the bluest of blue-state Democrats, bien-pensant liberals, Cathedral apparatchiks, left-wing academics, and neo-Puritan white-guilt signalers, and there’s not a one of them who isn’t faltering badly in his (or even her!) support of this horrid woman — whose venality, arrogance, mendacity, and all-round utter loathsomeness are by now almost impossible for even them not to see.
Yes, of course police shootings are down from their peak in the 1970s, as are all homicides (despite there being millions more guns in private hands since then). But there has been a burst of police murders in the past month or so, a spike upward from the overall declining trend. That’s evident even from the links you presented.
And yes, although refugeeism is generally a gigantic international scam, genuine refugees fleeing for their lives from hot wars — as opposed to terrorist infiltrators and mere opportunists, and good luck parsing the difference — should be shown compassion (although the family of that little boy you mention weren’t fleeing any war at all, but rather the peaceable nation of Turkey, where they had been living for a year). What to do, though, is hardly “binary”: the options range from turning them away, to granting right of transit, to providing temporary camps until hostilities cease, to immediate citizenship with full benefits. What do you recommend?
Passing over the many weaknesses in the maudlin and hackneyed analogies you always make about earlier waves of American immigration, which differed in critically important ways from post-1965 immigration, I will remind you that our readers are already very well aware of your concern for being — what’s that phrase you folks like so much? ah yes — on the “right side of history”. So, Peter, how many Middle Eastern refugees will you be sharing your comfortable home with? What personal sacrifices will you be making on their behalf?
To put this another way: at some point, if a nation imports enough aliens from culturally distant populations (and Mideastern and African Muslims are far more distant, culturally and otherwise, from their European hosts than were the European immigrants you mentioned above from the American nation they came to), it eventually reaches a tipping point beyond which the host culture can no longer recover. [Note: I refer readers to Peter’s own remarks, here, and to the discussion that followed.] A Europe in which Europeans are a dwindling minority will no longer be, in any sense other than mere geography, European — and in particular it will no longer retain the qualities that made it such an attractive haven for all those migrants in the first place. (At the end of the successive waves of American immigration Peter refers to above, the United States was still — in my own lifetime — 90% whites of European extraction, and just under 10% black, with other groups making up less than 1% of the population.)
There are dozens of majority-Muslim nations in the world, some very wealthy — yet the bulk of them have done nothing to relieve the suffering of these refugees. Instead, the flood of migrants have all set their sights on Europe. And once they get to Europe, they set their sights on Northern Europe, particularly Germany, Sweden, and England. Why do you suppose that is?
Here’s a question: if you are in a lifeboat, already full, and thousands of people are still in the water — enough to swamp the boat and ensure that everybody drowns — what do you do? Does Europe have a moral obligation to destroy its traditional societies, and to reduce its founding populations to minorities in their ancient and only homelands, to secure the approval of “history”?
Paul Gottfried has correctly described the repurposed Protestanism at the heart of the modern multiculturalist, guilt-driven Left as a striving for — and above all, the need to publicly display — “the personal overcoming of one’s depraved ancestral society.” One need not look far (“oooh, that awful Churchill!”) for examples.
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
1) I’m unconcerned about Hillary’s prospects. She has, by far, the highest probability among the various candidates of winning, and if the election were held today, she would win.
At the end of the day, it is Hillary versus someone else, and she faces weak opposition. It is difficult to see how Trump can be nominated in the face of opposition from Fox News, the Kochs, and the Republican party establishment, and his campaign will have the same Roman candle trajectory that former front-runners Gingrich, Cain, and Santorum had in 2012. The other candidates are all faltering and lack credibility, with the notable exception of John Kasich — someone I could see myself voting for. However I don’t see Kasich becoming the nominee due to his heterodox positions, from providing the working poor access to health care to his statement that, yes, Kim Davis should be in jail for contempt of court. (I keep waiting for a reporter to ask Cruz, Huckabee, and Rubio if religious freedom extends to a Quaker county clerk refusing to issue gun permits or a Muslim DMV worker refusing to give drivers licenses to women.)
Let’s not forget that Hillary is married to a man whose Dracula-like escapes from the grave have consistently defied predictions. Or that for her to lose, the Republican candidate will have to do better with whites and/or worse with non-whites than Obama did in 2012. Given Trump’s incendiary remarks about Latinos, and the timidity of other Republicans in denouncing them, this is an increasingly tough putt.
2) Four police killings in a month — six in the past year — is hardly a trend. In any random distribution, there will be clumps above and below the trend line. Even the Chicago Cubs can win a series once in a while.
3) While there are “millions more guns in private hands” than in the 1970’s, there is a much smaller percentage of households which own a gun.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/number-of-households-with-guns-on-the-decline-study-shows/
Fewer people own more guns.
4) Previous waves of immigration “differed in critically important ways from post-1965 immigration” insofar as they were much larger (at the height of twentieth century immigration, one in four Americans was foreign born) and the cultural gaps between natives and immigrants were much wider. A Yiddish-speaking laborer from the other side of the world had much less in common with an average American one hundred years ago than a Spanish-speaking laborer from our neighboring country, who shares the same religion as many Americans and has been exposed to American media since childhood, has with an average American today. The world is much flatter now than it has ever been, and the differences among cultures much smaller.
5) Western nations have a binary choice regarding the refugees insofar as they can help them or let them die. The specific help — temporary, permanent, citizenship, non-citizenship — depends on the country. It could range from temporary resettlement camps (as existed in Thailand for those who fled Vietnam) to political asylum to full citizenship.
6) I would be happy to make a personal sacrifice on behalf of the refugees, either in the form of taxes or giving to a resettlement charity. As for housing a refugee here: nobody is asking that of the Europeans. What is being asked is government relief in the face of a humanitarian crisis, not the spare bedroom.
7) We will simply have to disagree regarding the effects of immigration on societies. I don’t view mass immigration as destroying native culture at all. The history of America over the past 150 years shows that successive waves of immigration has been accretive, not dilutive, to our culture, economy, and moral stature.
7) waves of immigration have (not has) been accretive and not dilutive.
Pedantry is my core competency.
There was a clerk in Kentucky
Who thinks gay marriage is yucky
She just wouldn’t budge
“To jail!” said the judge
I admire her for being so plucky
To be clear: if Kim Davis is going to jail due to her sincere convictions, more power to her (assuming her intention is not to cash out with a crowdfunding extravaganza). Even though I could not disagree with her more, you have to respect those who perform an act of civil disobedience and are willing to accept the consequences.
“We will all be judged some day. Europe will forever be shamed from standing by while Hitler rounded up what Churchill referred to as “Hebrew bloodsuckers” and sent them to die.”
This is how I feel about the Jewish instigators of the Holodomor and the Red Terror, but somehow these events get overlooked in favor of German jews getting ovened in the ’39-’45 unpleasantness. You aren’t jewish, by some chance, are you?
“I don’t view mass immigration as destroying native culture at all.”
A statement that could be retarded, malicious or insane; I’m thinking a combination of the latter two.
Regarding Hillary, the only people excited for her are middle class, middle aged white women. At this point it’s likely she won’t even get the nomination, assuming she’s not indicted. The most important question facing Hillary right now is whether she’ll have to toss her beloved Huma to the wolves in order to avoid jail time (she will not hesitate to do so).
“Pedantry is my core competency.”
The Talmud is a wonderful book.
Peter,
1) I’m content to sit back and munch popcorn as Hillary flames out. Nothing more to say, other than that it’s not surprising that you like Kasich. All you lefties do; he’s really one of yours.
2) All I’d said was that there had been a recent rash of police murders, which there has. Whether it’s a normal statistical variation or a sign of something darker remains to be seen.
3) This appears to be true. Duly noted.
4) Sorry, but no. During the great wave of immigration lasting from 1880 to 1924, we averaged a little over half a million immigrants a year, nearly all of whom came from Europe. (A lot of them didn’t stay.) That wave was followed by a long period of very low immigration, which enabled those millions to assimilate (which happened quite naturally, as almost all of them were, as I mentioned, white European Christians.) Since 1970 we’ve averaged almost 800,000, and the composition has changed dramatically. (And that’s just the legal ones!) In the peak pre-1965 year, 1907, we admitted about 1.3 million. In 1991, we admitted over 1.8 million. (See here.)
The percentage of foreign-born in the U.S. has never been “one in four”; it’s never gone above 15 percent, and for most of the 20th century was very much lower than that. From the nation’s founding until the 1965 “reform” started to bite, the demography of the United States was, essentially, 99% White Europeans and West African blacks – the same as it was at the Founding. We are entering new territory here.
As for the Yiddish speakers you mention, they were European Ashkenazim, who happen to be the most intelligent human subpopulation in existence. They have made their way as a successful minority in European nations for centuries, and upon arriving in America got right down to business as usual, generally spending only a single generation in poverty. They founded entire industries, have a disproportionate influence in music, art, government and academia (often in ways that give traditional conservatives nothing to cheer about, but nevertheless…), and account for a third of all US Nobel laureates. Admitting a relatively small number of Ashkenazim is a very different thing than admitting tens of millions of uneducated, low-skilled, low-IQ migrants from the Third World, without even a pause for digestion.
Furthermore, previous waves of immigration took place before the existence of a lavish welfare state, and before the ascendancy of a toxic multiculturalism that, rather than fostering assimilation, instead celebrates “diversity” and whips up identitarian grievances against the traditional American nation. Instead of Irving Berlin writing patriotic songs, we now have Federal support for La Raza.
5) Again: why does the bulk of this responsibility fall on Europe? Why aren’t wealthy Muslim nations lifting a finger? We hear an awful lot about the evils of European whites, but it certainly seems as if they create the only nations that people actually want to go to, and their attractiveness increases the further north and west you go. Why do you suppose that is? Kipling is reviled as a racist for his notion of the “white man’s burden”, but isn’t that exactly what the geopolitics of the 21st century is turning into?
6) You greatly underestimate what is happening to Europe.
7) See item 6).
As for Kim Davis: why is she in jail for defying Federal law while pot vendors in Colorado aren’t?
I was mistaken about foreign born Americans, In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the foreign born population of New York City was 40%, and I believe the 25% figure referred to the Northeast.
Most Ashkenazi Jews did not come from Europe. They came from Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, the Ukraine, Belarus, and what is now Poland (but was Russia then). The shtetls they left were as unlike America then as the countries of origin for immigrants are today – if not more so.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sWSoYCetG6A
The overwhelming majority of Syrian refugees are, in fact, residing in Arab countries: principally Lebanon and Jordan, but also in Iraq and Turkey. You are correct that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE have done nothing – they left the burden to poorer Arab countries,
There is a man named Trump
Who acts like a horse’s rump
Some people are dim
But if you pick him
You must be some sort of chump
“As for Kim Davis: why is she in jail for defying Federal law while pot vendors in Colorado aren’t?”
Ditto for Lois Lerner, Hillary Clinton, the former head of the EPA, mayors of “sanctuary cities”, and so on. It is however refreshing that Democrats can at least mouth the phrase “rule of law” against one of their own–Kim Davis–without their authoritarian facades cracking wide open.
“Kipling is reviled as a racist for his notion of the “white man’s burden”, but isn’t that exactly what the geopolitics of the 21st century is turning into?” Isn’t it od that the south to north migrations now besetting Europe tells the story about how right Kipling was? In our western hemisphere, the same migration is taking place…Central and South America willing to die to get to the evil white (European) created USA and Canada? What is wrong with Central and South America? They have plenty of natural resources, all but a few countries have ocean coastlines. They have abundant nearby trading partners that share a language and many similarities…but no, they want to come to el Norte.
Peter, I don’t know quite how to break this to you, but Poland, Moldova, Lithuania, etc. are in Europe. (I mean, they aren’t in Asia, or South America, right?)
Also, looking at the guns/household methodology, it seems to me that this may be, at least in part, an artifact caused by the increase in single-person households in recent years.
“Most Ashkenazi Jews did not come from Europe.”
Actually, no: Ashkenazi Jewish women descended mostly from Italian converts, new study asserts
…continued:
“most modern Jews are descended on their male side from a core population of approximately 20,000 Jews who migrated from Italy over the first millennium and eventually settled in Eastern Europe.”
Re: Kim Davis, she’s not a hero. Instead of allowing some subordinates to marry homos, she insisted on forcing herself into this position (they went ahead and issued the licenses after she get arrested). Gay marriage is — like abortion — a dumb culture war issue that’s used to distract the rubes on both sides.
The context of immigration is one of cultural geography, not physical geography. From Wikipedia: “The Ural Mountains, Ural River, and the Caucasus Mountains are the geographical land border of the eastern edge of Europe. In the west, however, the cultural and religious boundaries of “Eastern Europe” are subject to considerable overlap and, most importantly, have undergone historical fluctuations, which make a precise definition of the western boundaries of Eastern Europe and the geographical midpoint of Europe somewhat difficult.”
I don’t think that many people consider Riga or Kiev to be European cities. YMMV.
Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman explains why Kim Davis’s recent incarceration was different than other examples of prosecutorial discretion, which presumably would include Colorado marijuana laws.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-08/kentucky-clerk-kim-davis-is-different-in-her-contempt
Ashkenazim are considered, genetically, a European people. (Indeed, if you have Ashkenazi blood, and get yourself a DNA test from, say, 23 And Me, you’ll see that you don’t get a specific sub-European regional tag for that component of your DNA, but simply ‘European’, because the diaspora of Ashkenazim throughout Europe makes it impossible to pin down a precise geographic source — unlike French, German, British, etc.)
The Ashkenazi population has flourished throughout their history in European cultures. As I have long argued, including in the post that follows this one, culture and genetics are deeply connected. Ashkenazim are culturally, geographically, and genetically European. Given all that, and their high average IQ, we should expect them to be much more likely to integrate productively into a European population, such as the traditional American population, than are Mesoamerican mestizos, Somali Muslims, etc. And of course that’s exactly what’s happened.
I will read Noah Feldman’s article when time permits. The larger point, though, is the general capriciousness with which Federal law is enforced — and, most provocatively of all, the tendency for it to be enforced almost precisely in accordance with ‘progressive’ norms.
Illegal aliens swarming and committing mayhem in major cities?
What are you, some kind of racist?
Marijuana dealers openly hawking their wares?
Come on, dude, don’t harsh my mellow!
Obamacare statute not written quite the way you’d have liked it to be?
Hey, whatever, we’ll just change it on the fly. No biggie.
Congress won’t pass the legislation you want?
Nyaah-nyaah, I’ve got my pen and my phone!
Traditional Christian woman in small Southern town sticks up for her beliefs?
“ON THE FLOOR!! NOW!!!!”
The commonplace expression “beneath contempt” has become so trite that it really deserves a coinage of its own. I suggest “nether-contempt”.
The obnoxious rantings of the disgusting OEM are beneath nether-contempt.
Hurrah! In the end I got a web site from where I know
how to really take useful data concerning my study and knowledge.