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From the Washington Post, a reprint of that 2013 blog post by Eliot Borenstein that I quoted a half-week ago in my post about Masha Gessen. Borenstein is less demented than Gessen, but then he didn’t get to be the Obama Administration’s chief of Russian-language propaganda either, so he probably ought to work on upping his crazy quotient if he wants to represent the U.S. government abroad.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was ‘black’ in Russia. Is he white in America?
How the jury perceives his race may well change his sentence.
By Eliot Borenstein January 8 at 2:47 PM
Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU and editor of the All the Russias blog at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.
What do Americans see when they look at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? And do Russians see the same thing?
This week, the court is selecting a jury for Tsarnaev’s trial on charges stemming from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. As any viewer of “Law and Order”knows, Tsarnaev is to be tried by a “jury of his peers.” But, as Masha Gessen points out in a recent New Yorker post, “very few of the twelve hundred prospective jurors resemble Tsarnaev.”
This question of “resemblance” could have real-world consequences. In a recent study, Northwestern University professor Nour Kteily found that participants were significantly more likely to demand harsher penalties for the Tsarnaevs if they believed the brothers were “not white.” …
The bombers’ racial identity has been a thorny issue for some time now. …
As Peter Beinart asked in The Daily Beast, “Are the Tsarnaevs White?” Beinart does a fine job reminding us that whiteness has long been a historically constructed and contested category in America, one that cannot be reduced merely to skin tone.
The history of immigration and assimilation in the United States is the history of the evolution of whiteness. As recently as 1988, I remember a limo driver in southern New Jersey explaining to me that Princeton was so ritzy “you had to be white or Italian to live there.” The Italians, Irish and Jews eventually overcame enough stigma to be considered white, but they were not “white” from the beginning.
Who can forget that famous scene in Gone with the Wind in which Scarlett is revealed to have an Irish last name, O’Hara, and is therefore immediate sold into slavery?
By the way, from Wikipedia:
Born Vivian Mary Hartley[2] in the campus of St. Paul’s School, Darjeeling in the then Bengal Presidency of British India, she was the only child of Ernest Hartley, an English officer in the Indian Cavalry, and his wife, Gertrude Mary Frances (née Yackjee; 1888–1972),[3][4] a devout Roman Catholic, who may have been of Irish and Parsi Indian ancestry.[5]
Merle Oberon was another black-haired Anglo-Indian leading lady of the 1930s.
Back to Borenstein in the Washington Post:
The color line is still decisive: Visible shades of brown or gold are an insurmountable impediment.
Beinart’s conclusion is that the obstacle to the Tsarnaevs’ whiteness is Islam, which in contemporary America has the effect of adding invisible layers of brown to otherwise pale skin. This makes sense as far as it goes, but it leaves out a crucial component for understanding the Tsarnaevs’ position on the color wheel: their racial identity before their arrival in the United States. Back in the Russian Federation, were the Tsarnaevs “white”? If they weren’t, what were they?
Bilingual speakers of Russian and English all recognize the disconnect between the terms “Caucasian” (i.e., “white”) and “Caucasian” (person from the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union); for Russian speakers, the two terms are functionally opposite. What, then, are “people of Caucasian nationality” (as the Russian bureaucratic phrase would have it)? Can their difference be mapped onto a grid of whiteness and non-whiteness?
Part of the problem in mediating between American and Russian understandings of difference is that Americans are accustomed to seeing race as the default category for otherness. The American preoccupation with race as a primal category makes complete sense, given that the country is haunted by not one, but two racial original sins (native American genocide and the enslavement and mass murder of Africans and their descendants). The power of American racial discourse threatens to suck the life out of other analytic categories; in the public sphere, the only way we can even broach issues of social class is to conceive of them as issues of race.
Indeed.
Russia is another matter entirety. Social class is not a taboo topic, and the notion of “race” has played itself out quite differently. … Whiteness is invoked conversationally as a function of status and comfort, with a casualness that would cause their American interlocutors to, well, blanch. Georgia State University professor Jennifer Patico provides an example of a common Russian expression when she tells of a woman who is proud of her improved housing accommodations: “We are now living like white people.” Here whiteness points to the speaker (who is, of course, white) in an unselfconscious fashion that would be impossible in the United States: whiteness without guilt.
Uh-oh.
Remember: white guilt is worrying that your ancestors were too ethnocentric, while Jewish guilt (see, for example, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint) is worrying that you aren’t ethnocentric enough for your ancestors.
… This does not mean that no one in Russia is “black.” … And it is applied not according to skin color, but to hair color: In Russia, the “blacks” are the people from the Caucasus. That is, the “Caucasians,” and anyone who might look like them.
People who aren’t blond have never been able to get an even break in Moscow. How high would Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, or Beria have risen without the pervasive structural discrimination against them?
When I’m in Moscow, I expect to be stopped by police and asked for my documents on a fairly regular basis. With the protection of my magical American passport, I usually treat it as something of a sport, baiting younger, Chechen-hunting police officers who have lost the Soviet-era knack for spotting a Jew.
… Just as Soviet Jews, who were not Russian by definition, became “Russians” in America, it is only by coming to the United States that the Tsarnaevs became fully white. And in the process, reminded us once again of just how tenuous the category actually is.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I said it then, I’ll say it now.
Borenstein said: When I’m in Moscow, I expect to be stopped by police and asked for my documents on a fairly regular basis. With the protection of my magical American passport, I usually treat it as something of a sport, baiting younger, Chechen-hunting police officers who have lost the Soviet-era knack for spotting a Jew.
Hunsdon said: a) Ha ha, Russian cops have lost the ability to “spot the Jew.” b) Baiting cops is a game you play at your peril. c) “You can’t do this to me, I’m an American!” d) the part where he says “And it is applied not according to skin color, but to hair color” is a lie, at least based on my three years in-country (albeit Kazakhstan, which lacked not for Chechens and Dagestanis at the time).
There’s an Italian-American politician in Kentucky named Daniel Mongiardo. Apparently he was accused by his political opponents of looking like Mohamed Atta and Saddam Hussein’s sons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Mongiardo
http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?s=1757828
Dzhokhar is lighter than I am. However, my last name ends in a vowel.
Timothy McVeigh was obviously Muslim, as he used explosives to commit an act of terrorism. He was obviously black because he was sentenced to death.
I concur with Hunsdon. There are way more black-haired Russians than Caucasians in Russia.
Also, here’s the Russian Wiki entry for Afroamericans:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D1%84%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D1%8B
Translation of the first sentence of that entry:
“Afroamericans -residents of the U.S.A. belonging to the negroid race and having a full or partial African origin.”
Wow, Portnoy’s Complaint. I haven’t heard of that since Dad brought the book home and Mom got embarrassed by its references to masturbation.
This was around the same time Star Trek featured a racial morality play about people who were black on one side and white on the other.
Now I live in a time when black is wholly on the left and white is indefinable.
And mental masturbation is everywhere.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lo0ks like this 80s rocker
http://m.famousfix.com/p12877133/peter-wolf-rolling-stone-magazine-united-states-4-march-1982/p5766
Funny, several of my Jewish friends love to point out that original sin is a Christian notion…..
MMM, since we are carefully parsing shades of racial identity, isn’t “African” an overly broad category, dear fellow? After all, Berbers and Caucasoid Arabs weren’t being enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic.Of course, for reasons that elude me, Black African (a highly useful phrase, so much less cumbersome than sub-Saharan African) seems to be verboten these days…..
Well, Merle did keep her South Asian ancestry on the down low:
I remember Boris Yeltsin doing a mocking imitation of a Chechen not realizing you can’t do that sort of thing in front of Western audiences. He hunched his shoulders and squinted his eyes and gestured that he was wearing a headband too! Apparently Russians consider them a form of ‘gypsy’ and given the Tsarnaev family behavior there does seem to be a bit of the Roma about them. The mother was a shoplifter and honest work did not seem to be a part of the family routine. The older brother made his American wife support him while he hung around the gym or engaged in petty crime.
Am I the only one who wants this guy to get the death penalty regardless of what color he is?
Soviet propaganda used to harp overtime on the whites oppressing poor blacks in America. You know, white living the life of luxury by exploiting poor Negros who work day and night and live in hovels. This was the mental picture the Russians had of America’s race relations. The expression “to live as white people” is merely an (ironic) reference to that. But to the American ears, of course, this sounds as an expression of white pride.
Incidentally, any Moscow cop will distinguish American Jew from a homegrown Caucasian in about 1/10 of a second. Moscow police knew exactly what Borenstein was before he opened his mouth. The rest is his imagination.
Baiting Russian cops is a good way for your face to get acquainted with a baton.
Of course, what is interesting nowadays is the way that historically White groups are trying to become non-White.Cf Arab-Americans trying to get their census category changed*, etc
Given this flight from White, would one be safe in saying that White is now the stigmatized category, Herr Professor?
* MMM, if they succeed, would that mean that Danny and Marlo Thomas will no longer be White? And would that mean that two of the biggest TV stars of the ’50s and ’60s were People of Color?
This ‘whiteness’ field of study is getting annoying. These people are making it seem as though Jews and others were not considered white from the beginning. But if that were true, then Jews and those others would have been excluded from naturalization by the Naturalization Act of 1790, which was limited to free white persons of good moral character. The very fact that Jews and other Europeans were able to be naturalized is proof that the US Government considered them white in accordance with the Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795, 1798 and 1802, etc.
Now I have no doubt the established citizenry treated the new non-English residents with suspicion and prejudice, which is a normal human trait. If a group of people, such as Germans, entered into a place where they could not speak the language, wore different clothing, ate different food, etc., they would probably be treated as outsiders with some suspicion until they assimilated culturally and linguistically into the local population.
What these ‘whiteness’ studies folks seem to be upset about is that the English residents at the time were not sufficiently welcoming to these complete strangers, who had different manners, dress and culture. They apparently did not treat them as full up members of the club, and did not give them immediate access to the all the goodies that the ancestors of those English residents had created.
Are they serious? What other cultures on earth would allow large numbers of complete strangers to show up and then immediately give them their complete trust, friendship and equal access to all their social institutions?
If those English people did not consider them white, then why not express it in those early naturalization acts? After all, the WASPs pretty much controlled the government, and unlike today, actually had some members on the Supreme Court. The fact that the government allowed Jews and others to naturalize is proof they were considered white.
Thank God.
Is Dzhokhar even Russian? Or ethnically USSR? This is way too simple. Life without parole or death. I don’t care much. Just get it over with.
And if they turn this guy into a black, does this count as a Black on white terrorist act and a hate crime?
For a Russian the distinction may be between Caucasian farmer and dark-hair Turkic steppe Hun. Nomadic steppe raiders have given Russian settlements a lot of trouble for well over a thousand years, so that’s where the prejudice comes from. It’s sort of like Indians vs. settlers in the Old West.
If only the fake UVa gang rapists had used Chinese beer bottles:
Video Link
The Flight From White has been around for a while; Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) first achieved prominence with a series of speeches she gave in the early 70s, stating that if she were in charge, then “ethnics” (her fellow Poles, plus Italians, Greeks, etc.) would get to be counted as non-whites (and therefore get affirmative action goodies). Needless to say, that went nowhere.
The “Whiteness Studies” field is basically an implicit threat: Even if you whites somehow manage to reverse demographic trends, we can simply take some arbitrary group of you (i.e. Italians), declare them “non-white,” and have another 80% Dem group voting for us. Hell, they’ve managed to make Asians a 75% Dem group merely via Mikulski-esque vague dog-whistles that they’re open to reversing the affirmative action quotas for them.
“The Italians, Irish and Jews eventually overcame enough stigma to be considered white, but they were not “white” from the beginning.”
Yes, they were.
It’s just more of the “history started when I say it did” or “history means what I say it means.” Of course, Madison Grant formalized the discussion about subcategories of Europeans in the United States during WWI, but there was never an argument that these subcategories–Alpine, Nordic and Mediterranean–weren’t White. They certainly weren’t Mongoloid or Negroid. Naturally, Grant preferred the Nordic subcategory, which was the vast, vast majority of the founding stock of Whites in the US. And he spurred a rethinking of immigration policy at the time. But of course people like Grant aren’t permitted preferences or influencing policy
It’s just amazing that Borenstein-types can simply say things they think are PC or scandalous and think they’ve won an argument or are persuasive. It’s like the arguments one remembers from grade school. Just weird. Who can deny the Nordics’ superiority? All around, politically, scientifically, economically, culturally, intellectually, artistically, etc., etc., which subcategory or other race matched them?
“Soviet propaganda used to harp overtime on the whites oppressing poor blacks in America.”
To be fair, Soviet propaganda got that picture from American inward-directed propaganda. And in the same way Americans, including Steve, got the picture of a drab, failing, dysfunctional USSR from Gorbachev-era Soviet inward-directed propaganda, the kind that was used to convince Russians that “reforms” (which later turned out to mean looting) were urgently needed.
American inward-directed propaganda is taken as the truth about America pretty much all over the world. Europe, China, the Middle East, Latin America. What else would you expect Hollywood movies to teach the globe?
“American… mass murder of Africans” ?!?
What a maroon. Dead slaves do no work. And the Abolitionists won the late unpleasantness.
No one thought Judah P. Benjamin was black. Nor Fiorello LaGuardia.
Let me explain Borenstein’s remarks. It’s like this: The highest rung on the nobly-oppressed ladder in modern America is reserved for blacks. Borenstein is socially ambitious. So Borenstein wants to be black. He can only be black if skin color is not the only criterion. So Borenstein must establish that some white people are really black people, if they are enough like Borenstein. Borenstein, like his boyfriend Masha Gessen (who also wants to be black), feels himself distinguished by the enmity Russians feel toward him* and the disdain in which he egotistically thinks ordinary white Americans hold him. He sees that D’Joker (whose first name could almost be a black-black-American moniker) is disliked by ordinary white Americans and by Russians. Even better, Dzhokhar provides a news hook on which to hang opinion essays. So Borenstein (with Gessen) explains that D’Joker is black, because if he is, then so is Borenstein! After all, they are much alike. And that means Borenstein and Gessen can climb to the top of the ladder and from there piss down on all the non-black white people.
*One might suspect that Borenstein incurs only as much enmity as he deliberately provokes. He seems to have a chip on his shoulder the size of a mature Douglas Fir.
“Sub-Saharan” is a highly offensive and ignorant term that perpetuates white imperial and colonial attitudes by suggesting that that region of Africa is “beneath” the Sahara as opposed to south of it. In fact, most of Africa south of the Sahara is at a much higher elevation. Please send a letter to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People apologizing for your use of the word immediately. Then send them a followup letter apologizing for addressing them by the term “colored people”.
Uh, I can, and plenty of other people. Jews, East Asians and Brahmins (those who settled in the US, that is) all beat “Nordics” six ways from Sunday, Jews arguably on an absolute as well as per-capita basis. And nowadays high-achieving Gentile whites appear to be just about evenly-distributed by ethnicity, or as near as makes no difference, strongly suggesting that the historical WASP economic advantage was merely a product of being here first or, yes, discrimination. And it’s also worth noting that the white group that has always been the most dysfunctional, the Scots-Irish, are both “Nordic” and “WASP” (by the literal definition of the term).
So by Adon Borenstein and Ge’veret Gessen’s definition, people suddenly become white when they go bald, or their hair greys. I’m sensing a flaw in this theory
There’s a surname in Ireland called Doyle which is an anglicized version of the irish words for black foreigner. The foreigners in question were Danish. Go figure.
I played guard on my all-boys Catholic high school football team. We had a star running back who was one of the few blacks on the team. We lined up in the stacked huddle to hear the play from the QB. In a stacked huddle, the OL is up front and the backs and receivers are behind.
The called play was for the big-time RB to carry the ball. As I heard the call, half bent over and my head down between my legs looking at the feet of the skilled positioned players behind me; I admonished the RB to run it hard, unlike the pussy footed display earlier in the game.
From my vantage point, I was yelling at the darkest set of calves on the team, which I thought was the running back. However, the man I was yelling at, who had darker calves, was our tight end. His parents were from Sardinia.
My Sardinian teammate’s skin was darker than the skin of my black teammate.
Jahar Tsarnaev is whiter than my Sardinian teammate (who is now a medical doctor).
Another consequence of the Soviet pickup of American inward-directed propaganda about America is the Russian idea that to to work hard is to work like blacks. Just like “we’ll be living like whites” means “we’ll be living well”, “I’m working like I’m black here” means “I’m working really hard for low pay.” Which sounds hilarious to anyone who’s seen actual blacks work. Americans can compare their inward-directed propaganda with their reality. Non-Americans only get the propaganda.
> mass murder of Africans and their descendants
Yes I remember reading about the gas chambers in Alabama and the crematoria in Mississippi.
Wait, I didn’t. The only mass murder of Africans I know about occurred in Rwanda, where Africans killed each other.
This is really sick. We have a ruling class that truly hates America and believes that we should be as ashamed of our history as Germans are of the Third Reich. To them, the American Republic is just the Third Reich writ large. They hate us enough to invent a fictional history on which to base that hatred.
Uh, no. The picture of the drab, failing, dysfunctional USSR came from its being drab, failing and dysfuctional, as Eastern Bloc refugees and dissidents had been writing about for decades and decades. Certainly that was the (accurate) image of the USSR in the US for decades prior to Gorbachev’s ascension in 1984.
Soviet inward-directed propaganda during the Gorby era was pretty much the same as it was in any other era, which meant it emphatically attempted to combat the image of the USSR as drab, failing and dysfunctional. Gorby-era TV news was practically nothing but pictures of robots and computers and space shuttles in spotless factories. Gorby himself was pretty much a committed Communist, just a very weak and naive leader, as can be seen from the transcripts of his Politburo meetings (both prior to and after his ascension to power), his belated attempts to use the military to violently hold the USSR together, his continued foreign policy of subversion in the capitalist world, his attempts to sideline Yeltsin, etc. Yeltsin’s seizure of power was largely on the strength of the (very plausible) suspicion that the August coup had in fact been arranged by Gorbachev himself.
And of course there’s the fact that the “reforms” (the economic ones, that is) came after Gorby was deposed, while Gorby himself has lived in relative obscurity (domestically) and poverty since he was deposed, which does not suggest that he was part of some secret capitalist conspiracy. The Russian economic collapse of the 1990s was in part because of record-low oil prices, in part because the USSR had produced an entire population that saw nothing wrong with stealing and corruption, that had zero work ethic, that had zero useful skills, that knew how to produce nothing of value.
“Uh, no. The picture of the drab, failing, dysfunctional USSR came from its being drab, failing and dysfuctional, as Eastern Bloc refugees and dissidents had been writing about for decades and decades.”
Masha Gessen is typical of the dissidents of whom you speak. If you believe her, you’ll believe anything.
And if it pleases you to believe what Masha and co. have told you about the USSR, if that picture strokes your ego, then you can’t honestly complain that Russians believe what the US-born versions of Masha and co. have told them about the USA. Namely, that it is filled with do-nothing whites who oppress hard-working blacks.
“Soviet inward-directed propaganda during the Gorby era was pretty much the same as it was in any other era”
This is so false that it made me stop reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
>The Russian economic collapse of the 1990s was in part because of record-low oil prices, in part because the USSR had produced an entire population that saw nothing wrong with stealing and corruption, that had zero work ethic, that had zero useful skills, that knew how to produce nothing of value.
Well, thank God then that the Russia of 2015 is nothing like that!
While we divert ourselves with sideshows like Ferguson and the Joker, Putin is well aware that he has just been dealt a hand as bad as Gorby’s but he intends to play his cards differently. Just as there was a “surprise” attack in Paris 2 days ago, I think Putin may also have some surprises up his sleeve.
“As Peter Beinart asked in The Daily Beast, “Are the Tsarnaevs White?” Beinart does a fine job reminding us that whiteness has long been a historically constructed and contested category in America, one that cannot be reduced merely to skin tone.”
It’s so funny how “whiteness” is this vague category to the Academic Useless. It seems the federal government has no problem defining “whiteness” when it comes to it’s own purposes. I wonder why that is.
It’s like the Academic Useless keep harping on the “conspiracy theory” as an eternal boogeyman, yet the Feds have no problem prosecuting conspiracies every day in the courts.
And Eric Holder claims “Americans” are too cowardly to talk honestly about race! I mean, just look at this lively discussion.
The “throw the Jew down the well” song at the country-western bar led by Borat (this was when Borat was a character on the old Ali G. show on HBO, before the Borat movie came out) must have been an epiphany for Borenstein. Everything he ever suspected about those horrible goyim (both the redneck-y ones here and the Borat-y ones back in the general area of the old country) confirmed!
Among other reasons, why you won’t find me offering effusive praise to Putin; he’s done nothing to improve Russia’s abysmal human capital. It is in part an intractable problem (you aren’t suddenly going to teach a 50-something a work ethic and useful skills), but he has had 16 years. And so of course we are now seeing that the Putin economy is a house of cards built on expensive oil.
Dick Riot.
“gh45 says:
“Soviet propaganda used to harp overtime on the whites oppressing poor blacks in America.”
To be fair, Soviet propaganda got that picture from American inward-directed propaganda.”
Much of which was propagated by communists and their fellow travelers who were – what a surprise – sponsored by the Soviet Union.
“And in the same way Americans, including Steve, got the picture of a drab, failing, dysfunctional USSR from Gorbachev-era Soviet inward-directed propaganda, the kind that was used to convince Russians that “reforms” (which later turned out to mean looting) were urgently needed.”
This is not true. The image of the Soviet Block as a drab, third-rate country predated Gorbachev. Ever see “1, 2, 3″ with Jimmy Cagney”, or the wild-and-crazy czech brothers on SNL? Or just about any cold-war era movie ever made. Ever read “Bridge at Andau”, about the Hungarian uprising, by James Michener? When I was a kid, during the time that Kissinger was pushing Detente, my family got a year’s subscription to “Soviet Life” as some kind of package deal with Newsweek. We admired the glossy pictures of smiling, happy comrades. And we all knew it was BS.
“… Just as Soviet Jews, who were not Russian by definition, became “Russians” in America, it is only by coming to the United States that the Tsarnaevs became fully white.”
If it makes him feel better, I’m fully prepared to not consider Borenstein and Gessen as “Russians”. Or indeed as “Americans” either.
“As any viewer of “Law and Order”knows, Tsarnaev is to be tried by a “jury of his peers.” But, as Masha Gessen points out in a recent New Yorker post, “very few of the twelve hundred prospective jurors resemble Tsarnaev.”
As Tsarnaev is busted up pretty bad from stopping all those bullets, perhaps they should find similarly damaged people to serve as his jury. They could start with the people he maimed and the relatives of those he killed. That would be a good jury for him.
According to The Times in London (a conservative newspaper) Black Americans with Masters degrees make less money than whites with bachelors degrees. That”s show how far non-Americans follow the NYT narrative.
Just nitpicking: Lenin was blond before he got bald. He was, at most, 25% Jewish.
someone had to say it
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/01/elite-versus-non-elite-mechanisms-for-censoring-public-discourse/#more-25978
So Steve, you know more about Russian culture now, than a man with a PHD in Slavic languages and Literature who has a long list of scholarly and pop culture publications to his name?
I remember an old Lives essay in the NYT Magazine, by a self-described WASP who referred to her husband as an “ethnic” and remember thinking that odd — as if English isn’t an ethnicity too.
It seems like American discourse would benefit from a broader adoption of Steve’s concept of core versus fringe, because this is what everyone seems to be tap dancing around. The founding stock of this country was the original core, but other ethnic groups could become core by assimilating. So, for example, the off-the-boat Italian immigrant may have been fringe, but his grandson would likely be core.
The one exception here, which Steve has covered before, is blacks, who had a unique history of slavery followed by segregation in the US. And who also are more phenotypically distant from the founding stock than most other ethnic groups. The child of a Jew or an Asian and, say, a German American will most likely blend in to the white category. That’s not true of blacks in the US due to the one-drop rule.
The mass murder, Oh gentlemen-who-spend-too-much-time-watching-television, occurred during trans-Atlantic passage, where the rate of “attrition” was estimated at %15-25.
Completely OT:
Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” will come out tomorrow as a film called “Predestination.”
And made by frauteurs, to boot.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_(film)
Like I say, a lot of the high-achieving M to F transsexuals like Larry Wachowski and Martin Rothblatt are intense sci-fi fans.
Weirdly, while Merle Oberon was passing herself off as white, she was actually whiter than she thought she was. The Eurasian Anglo Indian lady who raised Merle was actually her grandmother. Merle’s father and maternal grandfather were both white European guys.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2549874/Wuthering-Heights-actress-Merle-Oberons-secret-took-grave-sister-mother-gave-birth-aged-12.html
I don’t know much about those guys, but was surprised to learn that they are identical twins.
So there might be something going on there with their choice of stories.
During the Soviet era there were many Africans studying at Lumumba University in Moscow. Every few years I would read about Russians rioting there against Africans who were carrying on too much with the Russian women. Having sex, fraternizing etc etc…. Angry Russians would crash interracial parties and African students were beaten up. All despite the much ballyhooed Russian communist solidarity with all oppressed colonized peoples
snark snark snark
Appeal to authority.
[So Steve, you know more about Russian culture now, than a man with a PHD in Slavic languages and Literature who has a long list of scholarly and pop culture publications to his name?]
Borenstein, like Michael McFaul or Tim Snyder, could pass as an expert only until he opened his mouth outside the friendly confines of American academia.
You need to familiarize yourself with the concept of a dictionary and review the definition of murder.
Since presumably the purpose of the ‘Middle Passage’ was to bring slaves to the Americas where they could be sold for profit, ie it was fundamentally a business venture, how did murdering them en route, en masse, make sense?
[The mass murder, Oh gentlemen-who-spend-too-much-time-watching-television, occurred during trans-Atlantic passage, where the rate of “attrition” was estimated at %15-25.]
Do you know what the death rate for British sailors was on the voyage to the Bight of Benin?
That happened in Maoist Peking, too.
Being an identical twin is a pretty sci-fi experience.
Re: “Core vs. fringe.”
I’m not a huge fan of this concept of Steve’s, for reasons that some might call semantic but I think are fairly legitimate; that is, that the “core” is actually the fringe.
Like, which is “core” and which is “fringe”, the State of Nebraska or New York City?
Well, New York City has five times as many people as Nebraska, and a whole lot more than five times as much economic activity, even accounting for Warren Buffett.
What 300 square miles of territory can the USA least do without? What 300 sq. ml. of the USA would you choose to be your own personal fiefdom, if offered? If you were a Russian, and you had only one ICBM, where would you aim it?
How can the absolute most integral and important part of the country (indeed, the world) not be the “core”?
And then there’s the fact that Sailer’s “core”, rural, conservative whites, is a small minority. (Only 19.3% of Americans lived in rural areas as of the 2010 census). And a decidedly non-mainstream one.
They listen to non-mainstream music (country/western, Christian rock). They watch non-mainstream sports (NASCAR, rodeo). They subscribe to non-mainstream religions (Southern Baptists, Pentecostals). They get their news from non-mainstream sources (Fox News, talk radio). They go to non-mainstream vacation destinations (Branson). They have non-mainstream taste in home decor (black velvet Jesus) and fashion (cut-off jean shorts). They have non-mainstream taste in recreational activities (hunting, ATV riding). They have non-mainstream taste in popular media; for example all the ones who refuse to watch any films rated more strongly than “PG”. (My 47-year-old aunt in the Missouri Ozarks watches no television that isn’t the Disney Channel, and she far from alone in her small town). They have lower-middle-class jobs that are relatively insignificant to national GDP.
In other words, they’re weird, and driven in large part by a total rejection of mainstream culture. One can argue that they used to be the core, and now they’re the fringe, but it’s a denial of reality to say that they’re still the core and everyone else is the fringe.
So Masha Gessen made this Soviet propaganda film back in 1982?
Video Link
Look at those vicious cops beating up innocent Americans who just want jobs and housing. Look at the homeless black men who have been abandoned by capitalism. That was standard fare in the Communist era.
(Although I have always believed a hidden subtext of all that Soviet propaganda in the 1970s and 1980s about the horrible treatment of blacks in the US was to remind Soviet citizens that the US was indeed full of blacks, so maybe staying in the USSR wasn’t that bad).
Some of us actually lived in the Soviet Union. You can’t believe how stupid and foolish people like you look to us.
Core versus fringe applies to people, not geography. A married heterosexual white man in Manhattan would be core, and a transexual Latina in Nebraska would be fringe, presumably.
Boring, linear thinking, my friend.
We’ll look at a similar event. The Arabs in the Middle East enslaved some Africans, and as you say it was “fundamentally a business venture”, and one of the jobs of the Africans was to watch over their wives and daughters.
It was discovered at some point that said wives and daughters liked them a bit too much, so the default process became to raid a ransack a village for slaves and castrate the males before making them walk across the Sahara. Now as one would imagine walking 1,000 miles with a bleeding festing wound where your nutsack used to be is arduous…to say the least. The rate of attrition on these “slave ships” was thought to be about 90%, and guess what; slaves were in such high demand that the slavers STILL made an outrageous profit.
So you tell me, is castrating someone and having them die on a forced 1,000 mile walk, murder, or the cost of doing business?
Is chaining someone in his own vomit, feces and urine on a sub-standard ship, exposed to the elements for a month and a half, murder, or the cost of doing business?
I have an 85 IQ, I defer to you.
I spent a few years in my twenties trying to follow your lead, Tom Parsons, but I discovered that I had no talent for it.
Well if a PHD doesn’t mark was as an expert what does, 40 years in a Siberian labor camp?
Wat?
“Re: “Core vs. fringe.”
I’m not a huge fan of this concept of Steve’s, for reasons that some might call semantic but I think are fairly legitimate; that is, that the “core” is actually the fringe.
Like, which is “core” and which is “fringe”, the State of Nebraska or New York City?
Well, New York City has five times as many people as Nebraska, and a whole lot more than five times as much economic activity, even accounting for Warren Buffett.
What 300 square miles of territory can the USA least do without? What 300 sq. ml. of the USA would you choose to be your own personal fiefdom, if offered? If you were a Russian, and you had only one ICBM, where would you aim it?
How can the absolute most integral and important part of the country (indeed, the world) not be the “core”?
And then there’s the fact that Sailer’s “core”, rural, conservative whites, is a small minority. (Only 19.3% of Americans lived in rural areas as of the 2010 census). And a decidedly non-mainstream one.
They listen to non-mainstream music (country/western, Christian rock). They watch non-mainstream sports (NASCAR, rodeo). They subscribe to non-mainstream religions (Southern Baptists, Pentecostals). They get their news from non-mainstream sources (Fox News, talk radio). They go to non-mainstream vacation destinations (Branson). They have non-mainstream taste in home decor (black velvet Jesus) and fashion (cut-off jean shorts). They have non-mainstream taste in recreational activities (hunting, ATV riding). They have non-mainstream taste in popular media; for example all the ones who refuse to watch any films rated more strongly than “PG”. (My 47-year-old aunt in the Missouri Ozarks watches no television that isn’t the Disney Channel, and she far from alone in her small town). They have lower-middle-class jobs that are relatively insignificant to national GDP.
In other words, they’re weird, and driven in large part by a total rejection of mainstream culture. One can argue that they used to be the core, and now they’re the fringe, but it’s a denial of reality to say that they’re still the core and everyone else is the fringe.”
The United States is such a Multicultural country that no demographic group is really a core these days. Every demographic group is a fringe. A Bible Thumper American like Mike Huckabee in 2015 is not the core, but neither is a Muslim American or a World War T American or a Atheist American.
“Given this flight from White, would one be safe in saying that White is now the stigmatized category, Herr Professor?”
In The Dominican Republic nobody wants to be Black and in the U.S nobody wants to be White, lol.
“There’s an Italian-American politician in Kentucky named Daniel Mongiardo. Apparently he was accused by his political opponents of looking like Mohamed Atta and Saddam Hussein’s sons:”
I remember watching a scene in Borat where a Southern Redneck tells Sacha Baron Cohen that if he shaves off his mustache he will look less Arab and more Italian.
Borat had that Jim Croce looking black mustache.
Snorlax, your point is decent but you come off as a real cunt. Also you’re defining “mainstream” as “what’s cool in NYC”. By numbers, country music and nascar are more popular than almost everything else. The millions of people they are popular with are just invisible to you. Because you’re a cunt
That’s easy. Nebraska.
New York City makes nothing, moves nothing, grows nothing and mines nothing. Nebraska is a primary food producer whose output we cannot live without. New York City could disappear tomorrow and much of whatever value it produces (the stock market) can be reloaded from the backup servers located in… Nebraska. After all, how long was the stock market up after 9/11? Three days?
I look around me and there is not a single item New York City is responsible for making. I watch a TV made in Japan. I use a computer built in China with an operating system created in Washington/India. I sit in house build in the 1920’s with no material out of New York City. I wear clothing made in Pakistan. I’m eating food from the Midwest.
NYC is just a giant parasite sucking money out of people too stupid to realize the efficient market hypothesis was a scam to skim a vig off of gullible investors.
Oops
Wrong thread.
Snorlax writes “””””””The Russian economic collapse of the 1990s was in part because of record-low oil prices, in part because the USSR had produced an entire population that saw nothing wrong with stealing and corruption, that had zero work ethic, that had zero useful skills, that knew how to produce nothing of value.”””
Actually they did produced lots of value, that is what the Oligarchs and their western financial partners looted and so became vastly rich. And most of the population did see something wrong with stealing, only a very small minority became rich from theft. And the lack of work ethic came from not being paid for work since the Oligarchs and their western buddies were not only stealing the profits they were stealing everything.
Yes, this whole “only WASPs were considered white” stuff is nonsense on wheels, manufactured out of the fantasies of the usual resentful cry-babies. Unfortunately, this idiotic historical urban legend is not only propagated unchallenged in “prestige” opinion journalism, it’s probably already entrenched in our kids’ dumbed-down PC textbooks.
You can tweet “Irish immigrants weren’t considered white” in under 140 characters; that’s how Facebook warriors know it’s true. Any history the learning of which requires an attention span beyond that of a gnat may as well have never happened.
Eliot Borenstein writes “””Just as Soviet Jews, who were not Russian by definition, became “Russians” in America,”””
Actually when Soviet Jews came to America the newspapers headlines were
“””Jews find freedom in America”””
A few years later if some were caught dealing drugs or Medicaid fraud the headline then became
“””Russian Mobsters charged with various crimes”””
If the jury acquits them then the headline is
“””Jews falsely accused of crimes, anti-Semitism suspected”””
If evidence is found that the jury was tampered with then the headline is
“””Russian Mobsters charged with jury tampering””””
And back and forth this identity will change
I really don’t know what the Arabs did – they are stupid and violent as we are seeing in Paris at this very moment so I wouldn’t put anything beneath them. Couldn’t they have castrated the males AFTER they finished marching them across the desert? I suspect this is a myth anyway.
As for white slave traders, slaves were valuable cargo and you would treat them at least as well as you would livestock. They were kept mostly below deck and not exposed to the elements. They would be brought up and exercised and cleaned up periodically so they would arrive in the best possible condition. Of course there was always the risk of slave rebellion – if the slaves could take control as on the Amistad they would kill the crew. So security was a concern but so was preservation of the valuable cargo. The slave business existed for a century and a half and over time well understood protocols were developed for getting the maximum percentage of your cargo across the ocean alive and in good condition – how many you could fit in the hold in what layout, how to feed and exercise them while maintaining security, etc.
Of course, the Arabs also castrated their European slaves as well:
As for Blacks Africans (that flows so much better than sub-Saharan Africans), they were completely capable of killing large numbers of people on their own:
“And then there’s the fact that Sailer’s “core”, rural, conservative whites, is a small minority. (Only 19.3% of Americans lived in rural areas as of the 2010 census). And a decidedly non-mainstream one.”
I’d say that rural, conservative whites are only a small portion of the posters and readers here, if you add “rural” to it.
And while the most vocal posters here are what you would call conservative (I guess, it is a pretty mixed bunch though), there are a lot of people here who aren’t Republicans, Libertarians, or whatever other distinction you would care to make.
And if Steve cares to chime in, I’d be willing to wager he has more views and posts from either New York or Massachusetts than Nebraska, if he is willing to report some results of IP logging. Of course as you said it’s all about the population, man…
And as regards:
“In other words, they’re weird, and driven in large part by a total rejection of mainstream culture. One can argue that they used to be the core, and now they’re the fringe, but it’s a denial of reality to say that they’re still the core and everyone else is the fringe.”
Who’s your tribe? Who do you feel Asabiya with?
Not really keen on NASCAR, but I’ll take black velvet Jesus and jorts over being metrosexual every day of the week. And oh god, anyone who actually watches one of these mumblecore films…
Next thing you know, you’ll tell me dogs don’t like you. And that is a serious strike against you in my book. They know. They just know.
@- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLi-BWcFIBI
Video Link
Looked at the YouTube link provided by P Akuleyev above.
Looks like everyday life in a large city to me. After all, those weren’t actors. Things haven’t changed much in thirty years. Except for the ad preceding it which included amongst others a dyke couple doting over their newborn child. But that’s considered progressive.
And so of course we are now seeing that the Putin economy is a house of cards built on expensive oil.
Again, real GDP in Russia has approximately doubled since 1998. The ratio of oil exports to GDP has not undergone a secular increase and remains, then as now, about 19% of total output. Natural resources rents have tended to bounce around about 25% of total output, below the 40% you see in serious petro-states and are currently under par, at about 19% of output. If you bracket out natural resource rents, domestic product per capita is similar to that of the more affluent Latin American countries. The country has little public debt. It’s servicing obligations on foreign debt are elevated but not all that remarkable.
I’ve never even encountered this “mass murder” allegation before. Borenstein is just manufacturing new myths at will. That’s the power of the megaphone.
The thing about comparing different ethnic groups is that there’s, like, evidence to which we can look. Both historical and contemporary. It’s no good saying Jews and East Asians are successful in the US since they have nothing to do with creating the institutions, ethos and structures that made that success possible, these are utterly foreign to what they as people have created in their own countries. These institutions, ethos and structures are thoroughly WASP. As the WASPs decline and the institutions are corrupted and destroyed, it will be interesting to see how well all these non-WASPs will do
Jews? Historically scattered, culturally backwards (you want to talk about cousin marriages, etc.). It’s shocking how different and alien most Jews were prior to WW2. Israel? The ultimate welfare case, founded as a gift from the guilt-ridden West and maintained and catered to for decades like some precious and spoiled child. Still heavily dependent on the goodwill of US and German taxpayers. Jews thrive in the US and resent everything that has made their prosperity possible–the WASPish foundation of the US, its WASPish DNA to the core. Absolute role models for civic-minded decency.
East Asians? Please. Visit even contemporary China and its toilets, visit the corruption and and lack of any social cohesion. Consider so much of their wealth streaming out of China and wonder why the most successful Chinese are desperate to preserve their prosperity anywhere but China. What do they know about themselves and their people you don’t?
Brahmins? You must be joking. If China is a paper tiger, India is a paper slug. It’s not even worth discussing a comparison between Brahmins and WASPs.
Your only legitimate argument is to acknowledge the superiority of the Nordics (historically) and sneer that all that superiority should be suspect because Nordics are at the forefront of giving up of their achievement by not challenging open borders and anti-Christian attacks. And I would have to acknowledge a major character flaw in the Nordic.
Yes, black people generally kill black people and white people generally kill white people, so I take it this makes the deaths of Nichole Brown Simpson, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome, statistically negligible in your opinion.
My wife is Latvian, with some Baltic, Ukrainian and Russian heritage. She told me that the old- timers in Russian would refer to the denizen of the southern soviet republics as sveri. Translates as beast. My wife has blonde hair and blue eyes but slightly asiatic and tans easily, so in school she was teased as Mongol or gypsy. And Steve is correct. My father-in-law likes the fact Putin is Russian Russian, unlike most of the other leaders of the last 100 years or so. They are very attuned to ethnicity over there, and there are a ton of different micro sects, down to different setct of circassians in different republics etc.
In France you’ve got Zidane. People say oh he’s alegerian. Of course he was born in France. Like the Charlie Hebdo killers. But his heritage is Kabyle Algerian A Berber sect in Algeria. His parents emigrated prior to the Algerian war. He head butted that guy because he called his father a harki. When France played Algeria in football, er, soccer in 2001 people held signs saying Zidane-harki. The match was halted when French Arabs invaded the pitch shouting in favor of Bin Laden and down with France. Zidane was forced to deny his father was a harki (a traitor, one who fought for the French in the war ), but was a proud Algerian, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t French.
Tres complique.
I think it’s time for an iSteve podcast. Who here wouldn’t pay a few bucks to see & hear SS moderate a roundtable discussion on everything in general featuring all his top trolls: Truth, Whiskey, leftist conservative, &c.
That’s not propaganda. It’s folk wisdom among Southerners, like David Allan Coe: “Trying’ like the devil to find the lord. Working’ like a ****** for my room and board. Coal-burnin’ stove, no natural gas. If that ain’t country, I’ll kiss your ass.”
Now, it appears that people have been offering the same objection as yours for a long time. The Washington Post (yes, the same paper that published Borenstein’s piece) published a South African’s take on this “silliest and most inexact” of sayings back in 1914:
Castration was carried out not at the beginning of the enslavement process but somewhere in the middle most likely Coptic Egypt for someone from Africa. Your 85 IQ is showing. Truth I have been reading you for years. Your problem is that you are smart but not half as smart as you think you are and unwilling to face any fact that does not fit your narrative you twist like a worm on a hot rock to keep things focused with scattergun like intensity on your talking points and preconceptions.
I understand your logic, but you are sadly mistaken.
Your stereotyped image of Nebraskans is laughable, and what you apparently don’t know is that there are people in Upstate New York who share more with middle-American Nebraskans than Manhattanites.
These are the people who produce the food you eat. The machinery that builds and maintains your roads. The materials that your home is made of. They feed and house you, and you don’t know it.
They know it, and they are decent enough not to hold your ignorance against you.
I know farmers in Upstate New York and ranchers in Colorado. I know what they do for me and you. Your description of them is so wrong it makes you look like a stereotype who’s farthest trip out of New York City was Coney Island!
New York City has always been a special case. Since before the fricking Revolutionary War, it has been an international, money trading, business center. It is indeed “The Capital of the World.” I know because I have lived and worked there.
Because I am intimately familiar with the City of New York, and other places like it, I know it is not mainstream America. I know who does the work that makes and maintains my country, and it is not New York City people. Yes, they perform an essential service…just like those folks in Nebraska you so nastily insulted. Thats all.
Just for purposes of illustration here: The good people “upstate” from the city, i.e. in New York State, are more like Nebraskans, and more like “core” Americans. They are your farmers and factory workers and tradesmen. One of my best friends owns and operates a dairy farm there. New York is a lot more than a city. Every state is a lot more than a city. Every state has some “Nebraska” in it. That’s what you don’t seem to realize.
Same for me….
He might expect to be stopped by police on a regular basis, but that does not mean that he actually is stopped.
How many times has this happened to him? We readers do not know for sure whether he is claiming that it actually has happened to him even one time. We know only that he expects that it might happen.
I doubt that Moscow police stop tourists and ask them for their documents merely because of the color of the tourists’ hair or skin.
Borenstein alleged mass murder of Africans and their descendants, and he alleged that it occurred in this country. So your response doesn’t cut it.
Obviously, the slave traders didn’t want the slaves to die, but their deaths still qualify as murder under the common law “felony murder” rule or, arguably, as “depraved indifference” or “malignant heart” murder.
Of course, Truth’s response has nothing to do with Borenstein’s fantastic allegation of mass murders of Blacks in this country. It’s also worth mentioning that, in the Middle Passage, the mortality rate was higher among the crew than among the slaves.
You hit the nail on the head, re: Borenstein’s remarks. This is absolutely part of the broader mentality at work. In addition: having advanced via whiteness, they now want to jump the white ship that they perceive is sinking, so as to remain situated at the top of the new heap. This has been in formation for a while, and it is certainly one outcome of Gramscian politics and cultural Marxism – at least for some.
Clyde wrote, “During the Soviet era there were many Africans studying at Lumumba University in Moscow. Every few years I would read about Russians rioting there against Africans who were carrying on too much with the Russian women. Having sex, fraternizing etc etc…. “
Steve replied, “That happened in Maoist Peking, too.”
Interestingly, the Nanjing anti-African protests of December 1988 led indirectly to the Tianammen Square protests of 1989
Complete with the requisite genuflection to modern myths:
Never mind that it does not happen in mammals and we can never see an individual with a complete set of both set of organs because the sex differentiation process involves the destruction of either the Müllerian ducts or the Wolffian ducts under the control of things like SRY and WNT. The downstream constructs cannot be both present. Heinlein was clueless.
(Yes, I am sure that is what Heinlein wrote.)
So Steve, you know more about Russian culture now, than a man with a PHD in Slavic languages and Literature who has a long list of scholarly and pop culture publications to his name?
Well Chico, let’s put it this way to see which person’s viewpoint is more reliable. One of these people is a permanently aggrieved self-defined outsider with a vicious hatred of his host culture and who works tirelessly to destroy the host on which he feeds. The other is a guy trying hard to tell it like he sees it, for better or worse. Now which do you suppose is more to be relied on for, *ahem*, the “truth”? I’ll let you decide which is which.
George Costanza famously noted that it’s not a lie if you believe it; the corollary to that, vis-a-vis Borenstein, might be “it’s still a lie even if you pretend it’s the truth.”
Even if you are going to use the middle passage argument as evidence of mass murder, then that would certainly not involve the descendants of Africans. Where is the evidence of mass murder directed at the descendants?
Sorry Ben, My Dick Tracy secret decoder ring has been in the shop all week.
“Well if a PHD doesn’t mark was as an expert what does, 40 years in a Siberian labor camp?”
I see Kelly is already into the Ripple. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen someone not know how to write “PhD”.
“It’s also worth mentioning that, in the Middle Passage, the mortality rate was higher among the crew than among the slaves.”
Source, please, or retract.
“snorlax says:
How can the absolute most integral and important part of the country (indeed, the world) not be the “core”?”
It is not America that cannot get by without New York City. It is New York City that cannot get by without America. The rest of us in America would do just fine without NYC.
“Truth says:
Yes, black people generally kill black people and white people generally kill white people, so I take it this makes the deaths of Nichole Brown Simpson, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome, statistically negligible in your opinion.”
Blacks kill whites at a much higher rate than the obsverse.
Israel? The ultimate welfare case, founded as a gift from the guilt-ridden West and maintained and catered to for decades like some precious and spoiled child.
—
Western aid to Israel was negligible prior to 1973. By 1984, it was contextually quite large (14% of gdi), in part coincident on aid delivered to secure a non-belligerency deal with Egypt. Over the succeeding thirty years, it has declined in importance monotonically, and now amounts to about 1.2% of Israel’s gross domestic income, much of which is spent on orders from American vendors. Were it withdrawn tomorrow, there would be a recession in Israel of modest dimensions and some fiscal problems which could be worked out in the course of a business cycle. Israel’s an affluent country because they’ve developed their human capital and productive base.
—
People on this board are pretty consistent in displays of gratuitous and malignant aggression. Gets tiresome.
“Truth says:
So Steve, you know more about Russian culture now, than a man with a PHD in Slavic languages and
Literature who has a long list of scholarly and pop culture publications to his name?”
Borenstein may know a lot about Russia – that doesn’t mean he is a disinterested party who is telling the truth. Who says that people writing op-ed pieces tell the truth? The purpose of such articles is to persuade, not to inform.
so I take it this makes the deaths of Nichole Brown Simpson, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome, statistically negligible in your opinion.
—
These are examples of human depravity, as is the case of the man in Texas who was chained to the back of someone’s truck and dragged to death. The incidents are not indicators of a systematic social phenomenon; they’re too odd and rare.
Precisely. Precisely. Precisely.
Scratch a Russian, find a Tartar.
The professor, Borenstein, said:
“The Italians, Irish and Jews eventually overcame enough stigma to be considered white, but they were not “white” from the beginning.”
I’m a wasp with roots in the US back to the 1700’s, but I don’t see the exclusion of Italians and eastern Europeans from the racial definition of “white” as anything other than ignorance on the part of my ancestors (or their countrymen, whatever the case may be.) Yes, paleoconservatives, wasps with a sense of ethnic identity can be ignorant, too. At least they could back then. And if the exclusion of the Irish was also the case, then it’s pretty obvious that the term “white” didn’t refer to race in a purely biological sense, as the Scots were descended from the Irish.
Italy was the center of western civilization for centuries. It’s been said that the farthest limits of Europe were at one time determined by the extent to which art, architecture, fashion and influence spread out from Italy. And for centuries, Ireland pretty much carried the banner of Christianity alone in northwestern Europe while everyone else had reverted to (or maintained existing) paganism. Many white protestants in frontier or urban America didn’t really these know historical facts, so they came up with nonsensical ideas, at times.
Chinese and Asian immigrants can overcome all of the stigma they want, but they will never be considered white. Probably don’t want to be, anyway. Nor will most racially blended Hispanics, who often still want to be called white. But it turns out Wasps, Italians, Irish and Poles had much more in common with each other than they had originally thought. THAT’S why they get along with each other today, not because diversity did something wonderful to us.
Also, the term “black” meant something different over in Ireland for a long time – someone with dark hair and eyes. Possibly some Mediterranean ancestry, but not articulated as such.
Fourth Doorman, my friend, Heinlein was writing a time-travel story with a very involuted plot, not a biology textbook. The only thing that mattered was what readers (very few of them biologists) would accept in the context of a fantasy story (quite a bit, as with the notion of complete yet cryptic male organs going unrecognized by a character for years). Your complaint seems a bit silly– you might as well complain about Starman Jones botching special relativity.
As recently as 1988, I remember a limo driver in southern New Jersey explaining to me that Princeton was so ritzy “you had to be white or Italian to live there.” The Italians, Irish and Jews eventually overcame enough stigma to be considered white, but they were not “white” from the beginning.
So an NYU professor gets his understanding of the social structue of early America by chatting with his limo driver?
A great deal of this blog boils down to making fun of the latest silly ideas being expounded by “The Megaphone”. The silly people expounding these silly ideas, more often than not, are Jewish. Which raises the question: Why do so many people believe that Jews are far more intelligent than average when they can’t seem to open their mouths without saying deeply foolish things?
if they turn this guy into a black, does this count as a Black on white terrorist act and a hate crime?
He’ll be considered “white” for the purposes of “Who commited the crime?”, and “black” for the purposes of “Another poor minority shafted by the wicked white goys”.
And you are proud that the Russians have achieved Latin American income levels? Shouldn’t Russian levels be on a par with Finland or Sweden, if not higher owing to their vast natural resources?
Even though oil is only 19% of total output, it is the pole that holds up the rest of the tent and when you cut that pole in half, the rest does not just go on as before.
Interestingly, some of the complaints that Chinese students voiced sound like complaints that American Citizens are voicing today: Illegals have more rights and privileges than citizens.
Russia Today (rt.com) still runs articles about discrimination against blacks!
Not to the twins themselves, however. They are too inside the experience to observe it as a sci or fi experience.
Which has its analogue in the racial experience. You got these creatures called whites and these creatures called blacks. And they’ve got a history with each other. One where the large majority of whites until fairly recent times thought blacks were shadowy instrumental creatures, hardly worth thinking of in human terms. Now add to this mix a clear third race- Mongoloids, who have also been marginalized by whites, who as they incorporate and learn black/white dynamics (yin yang like), and who also have a strong bias to yin-yang processing. The mongoloids are both repulsed, yet drawn in as if by a vortex of light and dark. But the mongoloids now give a 3rd dimensional field to what had been a 2D racial world.
The great thing about this sci-fi, is that we all get to live it and it is real.
“…two racial original sins (native American genocide and the enslavement and mass murder of Africans and their descendants)…”
I can only say that for such devious, malicious, hateful, slaughter-ful people as we white folks are, we have done a piss-poor job at carrying through on those ‘two racial original sins.’
Another consequence of the Soviet pickup of American inward-directed propaganda about America is the Russian idea that to to work hard is to work like blacks.
Not just the Russians. I once heard from a co-worker , a Colombian immigrant, that I “worked like a black.” [trabaja como un negro.] As in working hard.
“the enslavement and mass murder of Africans and their descendants).”
“This is really sick. We have a ruling class that truly hates America and believes that we should be as ashamed of our history”
It’s deflection. The people saying it are the same people who started and ran the African slave trade who were the same people who ran the white slave trade from Moorish Spain. After the Reconquista they were expelled from Spain so moved to Portugal and started new sugar plantations on the Portuguese owned islands along the West African coast and from there to Brazil etc. They were the same people who ran the white slave trade of Ukrainians from the slave trading ports of the Crimea for about 3000 years before that and the same people who ran the slave sugar plantations on the East African coast before that. The history of production slavery (as opposed to house slavery) is mostly the history of sugar (and quite possibly the history of mostly the same families).
.
“Among other reasons, why you won’t find me offering effusive praise to Putin; he’s done nothing to improve Russia’s abysmal human capital.”
Their top 15% was mostly wiped out by the Bolsheviks.
.
“How high would Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, or Beria have risen without the pervasive structural discrimination against them?”
To be fair they probably would have been blocked before the revolution as non aristocrats and minorities. Although after the revolution the revenge of the coalition of minorities that made up the Bolsheviks was a tad disproportionate.
.
“I really don’t know what the Arabs did … Couldn’t they have castrated the males AFTER they finished marching them across the desert? I suspect this is a myth anyway.”
They took females and young boys so they didn’t need to castrate them straight away. (They did it later.) They wanted them very young so they’d develop a parent-like attachment to their master – like a dark age version of grooming.
Personally I think it’s reasonable to call the people who died in transport mass murder – just not reasonable for someone like Borenstein to attack one group of people for it but not Jews when Jews started the African slave trade.
The deaths of three people are statistically negligible, dear fellow. On the other hand, here are some statistically significant numbers:
So, the White American homicide rate is 2.64 per 100,000
While the Black American homicide rate is 17.51 per 100,ooo
http://www.vpc.org/studies/blackhomicide14.pdf
Which means the blacks can now claim Arthur Conan Doyle as one of their own?
If we’re looking historically, we’d average out over historical time, rather than simply look at the past few hundred years. For example, Jews may have been culturally backward in the early modern period, but they were more advanced for most of historical time relative to Nordics.
As Disraeli replied to Daniel O’Connell in Parliament:
Yup. But I suspect audiences will be more likely to believe Heinlein’s bad 1958 biology in 2015 than in say 1985.
Which is too bad about Starman Jones, because it’s really, really good otherwise. Kevin Drum has long argued it’s the summit of Heinlein’s juveniles and I’ve come around to his point of view.
I would only go so far as to ask for a receipt when they ask for a bribe.
“I doubt that Moscow police stop tourists and ask them for their documents merely because of the color of the tourists’ hair or skin.”
Have you been to Moscow? I have and I was stopped by police and I have blond hair and blue eyes. The cop asked me in Russian if I was Russian or foreigner and when I replied my nationality he let me go immediately. My guess he was just curious but who knows.
It’s also an opportunity for my co-ethnics of a leftist persuasion to engage in self pity and attempt to deepen camaraderie with their duskier brethren in the struggle. It’s among the ruder and unappreciative things you can do in a country that was pretty close to being a turn-key opportunity awaiting our great-grandparents upon arrival.
Any issues immigrants have had with the descendants of the US founding stock throughout the years pales in comparison with the benefits we’ve enjoyed by living side-by-side for over 150 years. This behavior is nothing more than an adolescent ingratitude they should be ashamed of.
Starman Jones best Heinlein juvenile: I agree, though I aver Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is pretty fine too.
Even though oil is only 19% of total output, it is the pole that holds up the rest of the tent and when you cut that pole in half, the rest does not just go on as before.
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I do not think an input-output analysis of the Russian economy would be congruent with your analogy. Problems in the financial sector can have horrible knock-on effects, but I’m not sure that’s true with any other sector.
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As for the rest of your complaint, the question at hand is whether or not the relative position of the Russian economy has change over time or the rank-ordered position has changed over time. I tend to doubt Russia had Scandinavian levels of affluence in 1914 and the effect of natural resource endowments on economic dynamism is haphazard.
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It is also difficult to assess because you would ca. 1980 be trying to assess a command economy with administered prices against market economies and then assessing a command economy in 1980 against a market t economy today.
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I do not think Russia compares unfavorably today to other Slavic countries. Some countries have seen long-term decline in their relative standing (Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1990, and three of the four Southern Cone countries in South America since 1928). I am not sure Russia is one.
Heinlein’s juveniles are pretty much uniformly excellent.The only one that strikes as actually bad is Rocket Ship Galileo.It was his first attempt at the form, and it shows.
RE: Starman Jones,
For my money, the top three Heinlein juveniles are Starman Jones, Citizen of the Galaxy*, and Have Space Suit-Will Travel.
*Heinlein’s SF take on Kipling’s Kim.And Kipling derived Kim from Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. So, Missouri 2, Britain 1.
Well, an M to F trans (Charlie Jane Anders) loves the film version of “All You Zombies”:
http://io9.com/predestination-could-be-the-greatest-time-travel-mindf-1678518884
‘Tunnel in the Sky’ was his best juvenile but I like Starbeast the best.
Jews may have been culturally backward in the early modern period, but they were more advanced for most of historical time relative to Nordics.
No, I don’t think so. They lived in other peoples countries (Egypt, Chaldean Empire, Babylon, Roman Empire) which were more advanced in their day than the Northern Europe of the time. But those places advancement had as much to do with the presence of Jews as the current advancement of America has to do with the presence of blacks and Hispanics.
If I were Will Smith and I wanted to get my son a career in sci-fi movies, I’d produce a modest budget version of “Tunnel in the Sky” with my kid as the hero Rod and a bunch of young talent in the other roles: it’s a sort of coed Lord of the Flies, but the young people figure out how to survive.
.. native American genocide ..
While there are doubtless people out there who really REALLY want to believe that the early white settlers in this country engaged in “native American genocide”, there is absolutely zero historical or archeological evidence to support the idea that this ever occurred. North America had amazingly few native Americans living it it when the White Man showed up … probably as few as five million people lived in what is now Canada and the United States.
So Steve, you know more about Russian culture now, than a man with a PHD in Slavic languages and Literature who has a long list of scholarly and pop culture publications to his name?
Troot, Troot, Troot ….. the Phd you esteem so highly was smacked down for his ignorant nonsense about American culture.
You’re two years too late, I’m afraid. Smith already tried to shove his kid down moviegoers’ throats in After Earth. The critics ran gagging from the theater.
While we’re dispensing belated advice to nepotistic Hollywood icons, we might suggest that Francis Ford Coppola should have ignored the critics and cast Sofia in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She would have been a perfect match for Keanu Reeves.
From The Godfather to Dracula in twenty short years … that’s Hollywood for you.
The murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and the torture-murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom were quite different in how they took place and especially the news coverage, or lack of.
The Simpson Affair became a national soap opera. For that matter, the Texas dragging death was a huge media story.
When it happened in January 2007, the Christian-Newsom case received little coverage (In Session did cover one of the trials by taped replay in 2009) outside of East Tennessee. What national coverage there was played it down in two mutually exclusive ways. One was this type crime “rarely happens.” The other was it was “just another crime that happens all the time.”
A commentator on In Session was a black defense lawyer from Philadelphia who used the latter method. He claimed crimes like the Christian-Newsom case were common “were I grew up.” He never said there was anything “odd and rare” about it, just a routine event.
That would be in accord with Heinlein:
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/faqworks.html
I recall somewhere else in the book in which Rod, the narrator, implies in some fashion that his big sister is black.
Yeah, if memory serves, I think that there is a scene where Rod is describing Caroline (the Black girl) to his sister, Helen, and remarks that Caroline looks a bit like her.
And you are proud that the Russians have achieved Latin American income levels? Shouldn’t Russian levels be on a par with Finland or Sweden, if not higher owing to their vast natural resources?
I can’t speak for Art Deco, or even the Russians, but I am frankly amazed the Russians are even still around with their own country to boot. They’ve lived in one of the toughest neighborhoods for a thousand years, endured several invasions from Mongols to Turks to Napoleon to the greatest military machine in history, spent 70 plus years under an oppressive regime which killed more of them than the invaders, and then upon their escape into freedom were almost swindled out of all their state assets.
No, Sport, lets put it a more logical way:
Jared Taylor seems to me to be a complete, and utter moron; yet I will admit that he almost certainly speaks better Japanese than I.
Hey, that reminds me, I have to come back to your site one of these days, we had a hell of a party last time, I don’t remember what it’s called, send me a link.
Ooh, a scratch Heinlein festival! I love it.
Mannie (Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis), the protagonist narrator of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, is black (perhaps mulatto), and marries several white women. He actually gets arrested for bigamy while visiting the USA and we learn that the “range of color” in his family photo is what provoked a racist local judge to issue the arrest warrant.*
In Between Planets Heinlein described the circa-2000 cell phone (though not the smartphone). He didn’t explain exactly how it worked though. That novel also has micromanipulators–miniature waldos–well described, and an anti-radar “stealth” scheme for a low-profile boat which is fully-described and legit, though in-fact incomplete– Heinlein was a mechanical rather than an electronics engineer.
I can charge-off “mistakes” of special relativity violations or impossible hermaphroditism to the exigencies of storytelling — especially since Heinlein uses special relativity in a sophisticated way in Time For The Stars. I don’t think such liberties are more objectionable than FTL drives or “tunnels in the sky,” equally needed to enable the human story.
Still, Heinlein made some unforced technical errors. In The Rolling Stones and again in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (possibly in other stories as well) he had characters quickly transfer audio recordings over ordinary telephone or voice-grade radio channels by “zip-squeal” at sixty times normal speed. That was a great idea but sadly impossible. Heinlein was probably inspired by the actual mid-20th-Century trick to evade radio direction-finders by briefly transmitting a tape of morse-code at a very high speed (the signal was taped at the receiver then played back slowly). (The Rolling Stones and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress also share the character Hazel Stone.)
On the other hand Heinlein fully-described a legit, though simple, frequency-hopping spread-spectrum radio scheme in Starship Troopers. He discussed the need for synchronized clocks and solved it using miniature cesium “atomic” clocks (first demonstrated in 1955– far from miniature then).
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is a gift that keeps on giving. In it, Heinlein described surrogate motherhood and explained computer voting-machine fraud!
*It is later revealed, in the plot, that Professor De La Paz engineered Mannie’s arrest to build sympathy for him back in Luna– though Mannie doesn’t know that at the time and greatly dislikes his treatment by the cops and jailors.
Kinda like the 10K-11K shipping containers lost at sea every year. Shrinkage.
I set the market. If I show up with a thousand blacks, the price is X. If my attrition rate is higher, the price moves to a multiple of X. To a greater or lesser extent, I’m getting my money no matter what.
Castration: sorry, customer, you can’t “make” any more, you have to buy them from me.
“Truth says:
No, Sport, lets put it a more logical way:
Jared Taylor seems to me to be a complete, and utter moron.”
What has Taylor ever said or written that is wrong?
“Art Deco says:
Western aid to Israel was negligible prior to 1973.”
So where did they get all the weapons they used to fight the 67′ war? Did those Sherman tanks just spring up out of the desert?
“By 1984, it was contextually quite large (14% of gdi), in part coincident on aid delivered to secure a non-belligerency deal with Egypt. Over the succeeding thirty years, it has declined in importance monotonically, and now amounts to about 1.2% of Israel’s gross domestic income, much of which is spent on orders from American vendors.”
So I take it you would not object to the subsidy being withdrawn then? Yes or no?
“People on this board are pretty consistent in displays of gratuitous and malignant aggression. Gets tiresome.”
Your posts drip with arrogant (and unfounded) condescension and – often – with outright lies. Moreover you are often a cheerful apologist for the unchecked power of the state and for a meddlesome empire. I consider that to be “malignantly aggressive”, and I find no-one and nothing on this board more tiresome than you.
Did Turks ever get to attack Russia?
Well, he’s a race-traitor who is anti-interracial realtionships,
An Ivy league soft major, who is anti Ivy league soft majors,
A self-admitted “inferior” whom the Japs blessed with residency for many years, who does not understand like “inferiors” doing the same here,
And a “libertarian businessman” who makes his living on donations from a group of knuckle-dragging buffoons.
Other than that he’s fine.
That can be followed to any logical conclusion. OJ Simpson was going to be forced to make an unnecessary and costly expenditure to his business partner at the liquidation of their partnership (divorce). So her death was simply the result of logical business decision that did not work out.
So why are so many of you still angry about it? And why was he charged with murder?
My mistake; after further review, on the item of “race traiting” It appears to have been Derbyshire, not Taylor that indulged.
Taylor married a Semite, he’s fine.
Did Turks ever get to attack Russia?
The Ottomans and Russians fought numerous wars from the late 1500s to the early 1900s. I don’t know the particulars of each and every war, i.e. who started it, but suffice it to say Turks got to fight Russians.
Right. Taylor is a hypocrite because he, and a handful of others, were allowed residency in Japan for a set number of years, but now he refuses to support tens of millions of non-European from residing in, and becoming citizens of the USA. I guess everything that guy says now has to be discounted.
Which reinforces the point that for most of history those north european cattle-herding tribes were tiny.
“Truth says:
“”What has Taylor ever said or written that is wrong?””
“Well, he’s a race-traitor who is anti-interracial realtionships,”
He isn’t. At least not all interracial relationships. I certainly don’t think he thinks they should be outlawed.
“An Ivy league soft major, who is anti Ivy league soft majors,”
He isn’t. I don’t recall him ever saying anything against the kind of traditional liberal education he got (Yale, Philosophy).
“A self-admitted “inferior” whom the Japs blessed with residency for many years, who does not understand like “inferiors” doing the same here,”
He recognizes the japanese have a right to exclude him as a foreigner. He only wishes that Americans should have the same right in thier own country.
“”And a “libertarian businessman” who makes his living on donations from a group of knuckle-dragging buffoons.””
He runs a small business (an opinion magazine) and he isn’t taking money from the government. How is that non-libertarian? Some of his contributors are indeed buffoons (at least I think they are). Some are not.
In any event, you did not answer my question. What has he ever written that is wrong – factually wrong?
As does Al Sharpton, he gets paid from whatever media conglomerate decides it is expidient to write him a check. As far as I know, he does not take money from the government, but that does not mean that I need to be impressed with his business model.
Mr. Taylor, as an American, has a right to his own opinion, that is fine. He seems to me an anachronism from the 1960’s and a foolish double-speaker who’s day is past. Many of these Ivy league phonies are simple disinformation agents promoted to a certain level to create conflict, because conflict is good for business. His site carries his name, and it appears to me, silly, sophomoric, one-sided and generally quite moronic. Basically it seems a little like the Nation of Islam newspaper, and the more foolish and one sided his articles are, the more the morons who read them contribute to his budget.
This is my opinon on Mr. Taylor, and by the way, my opinon on Mr. Anon has changed, I like the new measured, more even-minded you.