Costs of Multiculturalism

Review of “Dark Albion” by David Abbott

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Dark Albion
by David Abbott
Sparrow Book Publishers,  £10

There is a long and distinguished tradition of travel books by English authors  such as Patrick Leigh Fermor and Colin Thubron who travelled to exotic and  distant lands and tell of the strange ways of the people who lived there.

It is into this category that Dark Albion — A requiem for the English by David Abbott falls but this native South Londoner has not had to make much of a journey to find himself a stranger in a strange land. Instead he has just had to step outside the door of his house in the London borough of Greenwich and walk around and see how  the streets he grew up in have been utterly transformed by the largest wave of immigration that has ever hit our shores.

This is a story that could be told time and again in communities across England. It is the story of the gradual dispossession of the native English without public debate, without permission, without a shot being fired.

It is a howl of anger from a south London resident outraged at the betrayal of his people by their own elites. Read more

Teaching the World to Sting: Sailer on Feminism and Multi-Culti

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Steve Sailer has been mining comedy gold in the rich seam of 21st-century feminism:

Feminism: “Feelings / Nothing more than Feelings”

From The Nation, an article about how black feminists scream at white feminists and then other white feminists pile on those vicious racist white feminists. And how “trans” feminists can get very, very upset at the Vagina Monologues-type feminists who actually have vaginas:

… In a revolution-eats-its-own irony, some online feminists have even deemed the word “vagina” problematic. In January, the actress and activist Martha Plimpton tweeted about a benefit for Texas abortion funds called “A Night of a Thousand Vaginas,” sponsored by A Is For, a reproductive rights organization she’s involved with. Plimpton was surprised when some offended Internet feminists urged people to stay away, arguing that emphasizing “vaginas” hurts trans men who don’t want their reproductive organs coded as female. …

Reading this more closely, I realize I may have gotten this backward. The protesters may be individuals who have vaginas but are objecting to the cultural stereotypes that encodes vaginas as being – in some socially constructed sense – female. (Feminism: “Feelings / Nothing more than Feelings”, iSteve, 29th January 2013)

The article in question, Michelle Goldberg’s Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars (The Nation, 29th January 2013), is simultaneously funny, freakish, frightening and fascinating. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Similarly, there’s a norm that intention doesn’t matter — indeed, if you offend someone and then try to explain that you were misunderstood, this is seen as compounding the original injury. Again, there’s a significant insight here: people often behave in bigoted ways without meaning to, and their benign intention doesn’t make the prejudice less painful for those subjected to it. However, “that became a rule where you say intentions never matter; there is no added value to understanding the intentions of the speaker,” Cross says. Read more

The “Black Code”: Blacks discriminate against other Blacks who socialize with Whites

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You know all those ads where Blacks (usually cool and competent) and  Whites (often dorky and behaving weirdly) are hanging out together, often drinking beer while watching football. Best friends forever. The Hollywood/Madison Ave. image of America’s harmonious multicultural future.

Now we all know that this is a fantasy of the people who run the media. But its implausibility derives from not only because White people prefer being with other Whites—the phenomenon of implicit Whiteness. The  same goes for Blacks, and a recent academic paper goes further, showing that Blacks disapprove of Blacks who socialize with Whites (which makes me think that  such commercials are not going to be effective with either race) (“Testing the ”Black Code”: Does Having White Close Friends Elicit Identity Denial and Decreased Empathy from Black In-Group Members?“).

The “Black Code” referred to in the title refers to the attitude among Blacks that ‘‘relationships with whites must be kept at arm’s length maintaining a silent us against them mindset. Blacks who appear too friendly and comfortable around whites are viewed with suspicion; their blackness in question.”

Prior to presenting their own data, the authors review findings that “Blacks, more than any other racial group, show empathy toward members of their in-group.” In the  experiment Black college students (mostly female from an all-Black college) observed a  Facebook page of a White person alone, a Black person alone, and a Black person and a White person in two conditions, with same-race friends or opposite-race friends. Read more

Fear and Loathing of the Impending Roma Invasion in the UK

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Express (UK) caption: Roma migrants are taking advantage of Britain’s generous benefits culture

There is an increasing awareness that the May elections for the European Parliament could be a watershed moment. After listing most of the nationalist parties, Timothy Garton Ash, who wears his hostility to all things nationalist on his sleeve, writes in the LA Times:

“Today is the beginning of the liberation from the European elite, the monster in Brussels,” cried [the Dutch Party for Freedom’s Geert] Wilders. “Patriotic parties,” added [Marine] Le Pen [leader of  France’s National Front], want “to give freedom back to our people” rather than being “forced to submit their budget to the headmistress.”

There is nothing at all coming from the current leadership in Berlin, Paris or Brussels (forget London) that is likely to reverse the tide that’s buoying these parties. Behind their typical 10% to 25% standing in opinion polls is a wider popular discontent with unemployment, austerity and a Brussels EU bureaucracy that spews out regulations about the specifications of your vacuum cleaner and how much water you can use in a toilet flush.

If the tide continues to rise, what happens? (“Is Europe headed for divorce?“)

Ash suggests that a strong showing in the elections would “drive the mainstream socialists, conservatives and liberals closer together.” But unless these elites completely change course on immigration and national identity, I rather  doubt that they can stem the tide. Read more

Biology Beneath: Exposing the True Costs of Mass Immigration

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In the West, we talk about the “tip of the iceberg.” In Africa, they talk about the “ears of the hippopotamus.” It’s the same idea: that there’s something big in the water, but you see only a small part of it. Mass immigration is like that. Its harmful consequences are reported every day even in the liberal media. But the full extent of the harm is concealed. Here’s an example from the BBC:

Christina Edkins killing: Phillip Simelane detained

A man who killed 16-year-old Christina Edkins on a rush-hour bus in Birmingham has been detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act. Phillip Simelane, from Walsall, stabbed the teenager in a random attack as she made her way to school in March [2013]. He had been released from prison, unsupervised, three months before the attack – despite warning signs over the state of his mental health. … Mrs Justice Thirlwell, sentencing Simelane, said it was “likely to be a life-long order”. The judge added: “It is made for the nature of the offence and necessary to protect the public from serious harm.” She also expressed concern that Simelane had not been receiving treatment at the time of the killing.

Christina Edkins: A victim of mass immigration

Christina Edkins: A victim of mass immigration

Christina had been travelling to LeasowesHigh School in Halesowen on the number 9 bus, two weeks after her 16th birthday, when she was attacked. Simelane, who was sitting behind her on the upper deck, stabbed her in the chest as he walked past to get off. He was arrested a few hours after the attack following an extensive manhunt. … A memorial garden dedicated to Christina is due to be opened at her former school on Thursday. Speaking on behalf of the family, the great uncle said Christina was a “bright, beautiful girl” who was looking forward to her school prom and loved sports. He added: “Her headmaster said, ‘if a school could choose its pupils it would be full of Christinas’. Now the family asks the question –  when this man was discharged from prison on 13 December 2012, why was the recommendation, made a few weeks earlier by mental health experts, that he be supervised after release whilst adjusting to life back in the community, not followed up?” (Christina Edkins killing: Phillip Simelane detained, BBC News, 2nd October 2013) Read more

Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Politics in the United States

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This is a recent talk which was intended as a  general overview and designed to appeal to the unconverted.

My background is in evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists study how the human mind has been shaped by the needs of survival and reproduction over long expanses of evolutionary time. When we look at how the human mind actually evolved, there are troubling implications for multiculturalism.

Social Identity Processes

There are several systems that are relevant for how people respond to others from different groups, but I think the most important one stems from social identity theory. An early form of social identity theory was stated by 19th-century anthropologist William Graham Sumner, who concluded:

Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common products of the same situation. It is sanctified by connection with religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war. . . . Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways, these excite its scorn.

This essentially states that for humans, identifying as a member of an ingroup is a source of conflict with other groups. We are all aware that around the world there are many countries that are engulfed in conflict stemming from religious and ethnic differences—from different social identities. Right now the civil war in Syria is a good example, pitting Sunnis against Shiites, and within these larger groupings there are particular ethnic groups, such as Alewites, Arabs, Kurds, Druze, and Assyrians. Azerbaijan is no stranger to ethnic conflict, as in the war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Read more

David Frum is an Evolutionary Psychologist

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The point of my “Implicit Whiteness Sightings: Shutting Down the Government and Talk of Secession” is the well-replicated finding that people are less willing to contribute to public goods in multiracial, multicultural societies. This has a very basic evolutionary logic: there is a lot lower threshold for altruism and a higher expectation of reciprocity with people that look like you than people who don’t.

Now VDARE’s must-read Patrick Cleburne discusses a column by David Frum that has exactly the same logic (“David Frum ‘Obama Would Be a Fool to Pursue Immigration Next‘“). Frum notes that

the two most popular programs in the United States are Medicare and Social Security. Look at what they have in common:

1) They do not look redistributionist. All contribute something; all receive something.

2) They were launched in years of rapid economic growth: 1965 for Medicare and 1935 for Social Security. (By later estimates, the U.S. economy grew at a Chinese-like 9 percent in 1935. The unemployment rate dropped 8 points in that single year.)

3) They were launched at times when the U.S. population was evolving toward greater homogeneity. Large-scale immigration had been halted a decade before Social Security; in 1965, the foreign-born portion of the population was dwindling to the lowest point ever recorded in U.S. history.

Economic insecurity is important as well. Americans are thinking about the ever expanding $17 trillion debt and are deeply concerned that the future is unsustainable. From an evolutionary perspective based on social identity theory (see here, p. 70ff), this feeds into a circle-the-wagons mentality where ingroup/outgroup distinctions are magnified. The circle of wagons is composed of people who look like you. Frum:

It was already true even before the financial crisis of 2008 that the pace of demographic change in the United States was outpacing many conservative voters’ tolerance. Since then, two things have happened. First, Americans have come to feel much less economically secure. Second, the baby boomers have begun to retire, intensifying already intense anxieties about the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare. To add on top of that a costly new program that appears to compete with those older programs [e.g., the cuts in Medicare that are part of Obamacare] for the benefit of a different population…that’s asking for trouble.

By that same logic, the very generous social welfare programs and national health care of much of Europe would never pass today. They were passed in economically prosperous, racially homogeneous societies.

Today, White voters in those countries would be thinking about the hordes of immigrants who would be in the same line that they are for benefits like health care and subsidized housing.  They would worry that the never-ending stream of poor, uneducated, high-fertility, low-IQ immigrants—most of whom remain at the low end of the SES distribution for generations—will cut into their own prospects in times of economic difficulty. Not at all unreasonable. And it has nothing to do with hate.

It’s asking for trouble, but, as Frum notes,  “the Obama administration seems intent on maximizing such negative consequences. ‘You know that demographic change that’s making you so hostile to new social welfare programs? Let’s have a lot more of it! And faster!’”

This is playing with fire. As noted here, quoting William A. Galston, “the Republicans believe that their country has been taken away from them. They are

aroused, angry and above all fearful, in full revolt against a new elite—backed by the new American demography—that threatens its interests and scorns its values.”

These people may not be a majority any more, but they constitute a very large, angry minority. It’s what revolutions and secessions are made of.