44 thoughts on “Nationalism vs Racism?”

  1. The current set of anti-racist “visionaries” have no idea at all what they’re unleashing. We’d reached a decent amount of community, and it might have worked, right up until the great Lightworker himself, Mr. Barack Obama, was elected. Things have gone to shit ever since. Deliberately. You can’t make money as a race-shill in an environment where your race is merely subject for polite conversation: “Oh, your dad’s from Nigeria? Cool; mine came from Ireland, but he worked in Lagos as a young man…”.

    The reason it is going to go even further towards hell in that handbasket is because all these genius “activists” are playing as if racism is a one-way street, which it most certainly is not. Once they’ve finished undoing all the work we’ve done since the 1960s, which is what they are doing, the really-real, truly energetic sort of racism is going to take off like a rocket, because it will either “be a racy-race-racist” or die in the ensuing hate-filled cesspool that they’ve turned our country into.

    The numbers are not in favor of America’s blacks or other fractional minorities. They lack the numbers, and the raw fact is, they’re making the mistake of lumping in the various Asian minorities and white-looking Hispanics in with the “evil whites”. Couple that with black criminality, and it’s gonna be very easy for all too many to look the other way when the local Mexican gang-bangers chase the local black families out of the neighborhood, and off to God alone knows what fate. Same with the vocal Muslims–The way they’re going, pogroms are going to happen with an inevitability that’s almost biblical.

    We’re being “managed” into a major breakdown in race relations. If you look, you can see it happening, and it won’t work out the way the people behind the management think it will.

    Of course, who the hell knows what their motives are. Given the Democratic Party’s history, it could still be run by unreconstructed KKK types for all I know. They certainly couldn’t be doing a better job of convincing the rest of us that racism is just survival instinct in practical terms.

  2. I find it interesting that Anne Frank’s father, was an officer in the WWI German Army (field promotion to lieutenant)….20 years later, he and his family were hunted down and thrown into concentration camps.

    Excesses of Nationalism *can* lead to terrible results…a lot of people were killed and crippled in WWI…but when the nationalist belief that ‘we people who share this geography and this broad set of values are all in it together, in many ways’–is replaced by the racist/tribalist belief that it is only people with a certain skin color or ethnic heritage are in it together…the results are worse and those worse results are more inevitable.

  3. @David Foster,

    Anne Frank’s father was just another sucker like the rest of us, who bought into what he’d been told during Wilhelmine Germany. His mistake was in not running far enough, once he sussed out what the Nazis were up to. No doubt, he looked at his WWI experience and assumed that Dutch neutrality would be sufficiently far.

    It’s just like anything, with nationalism and racism–It’s the dose that makes the poison. A little bit of both, and you’re OK–Serves as a bit of spice in day-to-day life, as in the generally healthy ethnic pride demonstrations you see around various holidays like St. Patrick’s Day. Too much? Yeah; that’s the problem; you start thinking that it’s a good idea to kill your ethnic rivals, or even treat them differently because skin color? You’ve got a problem; you’re on a slippery slope that ends nowhere good, and if the world works the way it normally does, you’re going to do more damage to your own than you do them. Germany thought to “solve the Jewish problem”; look where it got them: Nation in ruins, millions of dead, and a historical reputation for horror that they’re going to carry for generations to come.

    To put things bluntly… Any and all of the various “-isms” are bad things, and none of them work out at all well for the people taking them up. Down that path? Lies madness, despair, and utter ravening horror at the end.

  4. We are headed into a Wiemar Germany phase once the Democrats bankrupt the country. What comes after that should be a concern of minorities, especially the black minority which thinks it is in power over the rest these days. The two places where blacks seem to be in power are prisons and Congress. Both are too visible for their own good if the country goes nationalist / authoritarian after the collapse.

  5. Exactly the point I’ve been making… The pendulum swings both ways; the harder you push it off-center and the further it goes, the more extreme the backswing.

    I don’t think that the country is going to be recognizable after all this is over. Multi-ethnic melting pot? Nope; enclave Balkanization is way more likely, and the current deal where we’re subsidizing the parasites? Not going to be in place. Mexicans won’t work to support black indolence and criminality.

    If I had to guess, black America is going to look a lot like what’s left of the Native American one–Reservations with walls, and very little in the way of resources. And, unlike the current reservation system, I don’t think they’re going to be allowed out by the coming American regime. Also, look for ever-tightening walls on those reservations, closing in on the criminal and innocent alike.

    There won’t be much room for mercy, in the coming years. Or, forgiveness.

  6. Heck, we have no idea what racism is anymore. If you start reading stuff by the CRT scammers you will walk away with a sever headache.

    The antidote for racism was described by Martin Luther King. It is judging people by the content of their character.

  7. Oh, we have a good idea of how racism is now defined: Anything that is at all successful, productive behavior. By anyone.

    At some point in the not-so-distant future, normal, sane “white” Americans are going to recognize the realities, and then all of this is going to come to a screeching halt when they further realize that their own necks are on the chopping block. At that point, the chicken is going to realize a couple of things: One, they outnumber the “race-farmers”, and that, two, it’s a “them-or-us” proposition. At that point?

    You tell me. I don’t think it’s going to be a lot of fun, for anyone.

  8. “the nationalist belief that ‘we people who share this geography and this broad set of values are all in it together, in many ways’”
    I’ve said this before, but this is a very American definition on nation/nationalism. A more standard definition is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation):
    “A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a common language, history, ethnicity, a common culture and, in many cases, a shared territory.”
    Americans don’t realize that the term nation-state isn’t a redundancy. So Americans can say German Nationalism would be good because it would mean ethnic Germans and Turks can together have a shared loyalty to the German state, but Europeans hear it as bad because it would mean that those two groups are on opposite sides–in Europe nationalism was what ripped apart multinational entities like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, etc.–people became loyal to their “nation” and that was what brought together Italy and Germany and tore apart the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.
    So the million dollar question is, what are people loyal to in the 21st century?

  9. This has been a favorite topic of mine for well over a decade. Yes, nationalism is ultimately needed to defeat racism. Countries in which the “races” are so close that they are indistinguishable (Flemish-Walloons, Magyars-Transylvanians) have no idea what real race and real nationalism is. The countries where there actually are different races trying to get along are few. The Americans likely lead in this (the Canadians have a legitimate claim to excel us in this, though their First Nations people might disagree). Who outside the Anglosphere is even in the conversation?

    https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/search?q=nationalism

  11. “especially the black minority which thinks it is in power over the rest these days” Are you referring to the black community at large, or the race hustlers who try to define the rest of us? Because if the latter then I agree, if the former then I will have to say that the globo-homo progs have fooled you., and I say that while unfortunately agreeing with most for what you wrote

  12. If homicides throughout history were to be charted by motive, race would be less than a blip while “nationalism” as it has been interpreted stand well above but right next to religion with the understanding that many were motivated by both. Race as it’s conceived today is almost wholly an invention of the late 19th century.

    The American Indians and the Australia Aborigines weren’t killed/displaced because they were a different color, they were in the way. And those two examples nearly exhaust the large scale bloodletting between different races.

    Africans weren’t enslaved because they were black, they were enslaved by other Africans and sold to the highest bidder. The skin coloration was a convenient demarcation but slave owners have never lacked different ways of marking their property when they needed to.

  13. Niemoller was a naval officer, a u boat captain, if memory serves, yes the tribal chiefs were the motors of the slave trade, and generations later, they formed the warlords and peoples democracy junta leaders, of course arabs colonized east africa, (particularly omanis did to places like kenya

  14. @MCS – you have to stretch both the terms “nationalism” and “religion” beyond recognition to call them major drivers of war. People thought in terms of their clan, or their tribe, which were much smaller groups than nations, unifying under threat from outside forces into “nations.” Emperors as far back as the Akkadians seem to be animated by personal, not national motives. The inscriptions laud their mastery and personal prowess. They do like to draw legitimacy from religion, associating themselves with various single deities.

    In terms of sheer numbers, seven out of the ten most deadly wars in history were in Asia and don’t seem to be religious at all. The death in the New World was from disease, and the goal was gold and trade goods. Religion is usually brought in to legitimise, but is seldom the reason for going to war. After all, while people at war are often different in many things, including which side they crack their eggs on, they are sometimes of the same religion.

  15. I think religion and nationalism are often used as justifications for things a lot more than they’re direct causes–To blame them is to put the cart before the horse.

    Yeah, the Imperial Germans were nationalist, but they were expansionist entitled assholes first. See “Teutonic Brotherhood” for antecedents. The Imperial Germany we all know and hate essentially harnessed nationalism to build out the empire, not the other way around.

    Like I said… The dose makes the poison. A little bit of national pride, say in your good Bavarian beer? Harmless; you can argue with your Czech neighbor who brews the better product. You get to the point where you’re invading Czechoslovakia because you don’t like their pilseners? You have a problem, and it ain’t the nationalism–You’re an asshole.

    Don’t be an asshole.

  16. Too much at once–let me bite off a small piece or two and think about the rest.

    I’ve studied European history and geography, and traveled a fair bit, but had not felt the reality of it intensely until we visited Prague at the end of an Elbe trip in November 2019.

    It’s just a short drive from Germany to Prague, and I for a moment I grokked what it’s like to have that big, energetic neighbor. Right. Over. There.

  17. “especially the black minority which thinks it is in power over the rest these days” Are you referring to the black community at large, or the race hustlers who try to define the rest of us?

    The “Black Community” has been electing race hustlers for decades. Why ? The “Defund the Police” scam hurts blacks the most yet they vote for these people. Eventually, the rest of us get tired of people like Cori Bush.

    “I’m not going to shy away from ‘defund the police.’ Listen to the message of what we’re saying. I’m going to keep pushing you until you deal with the fact that we are dying. I don’t care if you don’t like the words. How much more should you not like the fact that Black folks in this community are dying at the rates that we’re dying at the hands of police?” she said while giving a reporter a tour of her district. “No one is dealing with it. So, because they left that piece for me, this is still there, I have to attack it as hard and as fast as I can.”

    While she spends $200,000 of tax payer money on personal security.

  19. @Cousin Eddie,

    Thing you have to remember, though… It wasn’t always “…that big, energetic neighbor.”. For the longest damn time, it was that cluster-fark of a bunch of disorganized little principalities that everyone in Europe laughed at for their inability to get their s**t together. Germany as a “big neighbor” didn’t happen until well into the 19th Century, and before that, about all Prague had to worry about were those “other Germans” who were about equally inept.

    Whenever you do European history, and try to put yourself into the shoes of someone from a particular period, you have to reset your viewpoint and expectations to the then-current reality–Which, for the longest damn time, was “Germany disunited”.

    Having France as a neighbor, though…? Uuuuuuuggggly… For a given period, that is. The whole thing is an ebb and flow; someone has their day in the sun, then someone else. Perspective is something you have to work at, and try to work within for the period in question.

    You have to keep in mind that once upon a time, Germany was the joke military power in Europe, and France was the unquestioned powerhouse that everyone feared… 1870 and 1914 changed all that.

  20. @Mike K,

    Don’t worry… When the new Hispanic/Asian majority takes over running things, which an awful lot of “whites” are going to pass over into, the shoe will be quite on the other foot.

    Folk memory is a bitch, and what Mexican folk memory tells the majority of the Indio Mexicans is that the blacks that came to Mexico were the overseers and whip-masters in all the Spanish mines and fincas. They still carry a grudge, too. They may not know why, but they still carry it. When they’re running things up here, it won’t be good times for black America. You can already see this happening in California–When it hits national level? LOL… All the race hustlers are going to be in a world of hurt… Well, at least, the black ones.

    Nobody reads history, nobody talks to people and tries to learn why they do the things they do, and where their attitudes come from. This is a fundamental of the human condition, and it’s tragicomic. If you’re halfway paying attention, you can see and work all of this out for yourself, but you have to be paying attention.

  21. In just over five years the same “four score and seven years” that separated the Gettysburg Address from the Declaration of Independence will have elapsed since the start of WWII. That peaceful interlude is surely the longest in Europe for 2,000 years and more. To the extant that the reasons for any of those countless conflicts, either real or perceived, are known, race is not present, nor are the many millions of dead.

    The men that fought their way ashore on D-Day still had months of fighting to survive in order to fight over the same ground their fathers had fought over in the Great War. This same ground that is littered with the detritus and haunted by the dead from generations of battles through history.

  22. MCS, let me throw a few rocks through that beautiful facade you build, describing the brave, new Europa:

    First and foremost, the demographics: For the first time since the Fall of Rome and the Black Death, we have a depopulation of the native European stocks going on. Why is this, if peace and fraternity are so wonderful? Most of the European ethnic birth rates have been below replacement level for decades, which does not point to good things coming down the pike for those populations.

    Second, the “engine of dynamism” that Europe once served as is no longer spinning anywhere near as fast as it once did, and may even have stopped from some points of view. Again, if things are so wonderful, why is Europe behind in so many ways? When was the last chip fab built in Europe? “Europe” is an economic block larger than the US, and far larger than the former Soviet Union’s remnants: Why are they only launching satellites, and those sporadically? At any measure of “dynamism” in technology and industry, Europe lags behind Asia.

    The third question is one of political stability: The Cold War damped out a lot of regional conflicts, but when you look at the looming issues in between all the various little sub-nationalities like the Flemings and the Walloons in Belgium, and the nascent Catalonian separatist movement in Spain, the question has to be asked: Does all this peace really mean anything, or did we just put a stopper in the pressure relief valve and turn our backs on the overheated boiler of intra-European conflict?

    I think it’s great they’re not killing people in job lots over there these days, but at the same time…? I have some questions about the price that’s being paid, and what bills are going to eventually come due. I don’t think that the European Union has really been addressing the fundamental issues that exist, and that they’re whistling as they walk past the graveyard just a little too hard. The fertility rates tell you an awful lot about how the people of Europe really feel, and if they vote “No” on having kids? It’s unfortunate that we’re so far from artificial wombs, because that’s about the only way they’d get the numbers up, under current conditions.

    People tell me how great things are, these days. Then, I look at the fertility rates, and I’m like “Oh, really…? Things are so great, people want more kids to share the good times with, huh?”. Optimists start families and make plans for the future; pessimists stay single and party hard until the end times come, leaving no hostages to fortune. Europe ain’t demonstrating a tremendous amount of positivity and optimism, birth-wise. Not that we are, either, but…

    Also, do note the common factors: Socialistic public policy, heavy taxation, lack of opportunity for the young as their elders pull up the ladders of economic success behind them. Europe and the US both voted their way into these policies, and they’re deadly over the long haul.

  23. Another word on the future of Europe. The immigration into Europe, with the exception of a few post Iron Curtain states like Hungary, is Muslim, a culture that does not do well in modern society. Immigration to the US, to the extent that we know who they are, has been largely Hispanic until now, a culture that assimilates pretty well with evidence from recent census data. For the past 6 months, the population coming through the open border may have shifted in unknown ways but Christian Hispanics are unlikely to affect the culture as radically as Muslim immigrants do to Europe.

  24. There’s one thing we can predict about it, though… Increased ethnic strife between the “New America” and its black minority.

    People do not give this enough attention, especially in the “activist community”–We may escape the horrors, but… Yeah. Take a long, hard look at the number of ethnic blacks left in Central America and anywhere the Spanish held sway. The Portuguese imported blacks as slaves and replacement population. The Spanish used them as overseers and running their forced-labor efforts across the regions they held sway. If the numbers are accurate, there were about the same number of blacks brought into the US as there were Central America. By the 1860s, there were four million of them here in the US; you want to find blacks in Mexico and Central America? You’d better take a very fine-toothed comb and go looking: There aren’t all that many. There are reasons for that, and most of those have to do with the long-standing grudge between them and the native Indio populations. An acquaintance of mine is full-blood Indio from up in the hills around Zacatecas, from one of the communities that were nearly worked to death in the mines. You do not want to discuss “race relations” with him; there’s a reflexive hatred of blacks that I’m not even sure he understands, but once you make the connection between “overseer” and “silver mine” the whole thing makes a horrible sort of sense. There are folk memories there, and they’re not good ones.

    Watching what’s been going on in California the last few years, I think we’re in for a real shit-show when that goes on a national scale. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but I wouldn’t want to live anywhere near where the conflict zones are likely to be.

  25. On Europe’s demographic replacement — the question of whether to have children lies with women. And we should remember that having a baby is the fast part — bringing up that baby as a productive responsible citizen is a challenging two decades process (or more in modern Germany).

    Hard data is not easy to find. Anecdotally, the great unspeakable story about European births is the influence of social class. The middle class girl stays in school, gets credentialed, gets a job, struggles with relationships & debt, and delays having children or avoids it altogether. On the other hand, white trash teenage girls get pregnant, encouraged by extraordinarily generous European support for single mothers; this pattern is passed on to their offspring.

    Leaving aside the very important issue of highly fertile immigrants (Mohammed is one of the most popular names for male babies in England, it is said), today’s young Europeans are on average not absorbing the same cultural aspirations as those of half a century ago — and tomorrow’s will on average depart even further from that model. The world is changing!

  26. Kirk: “If the numbers are accurate, there were about the same number of blacks brought into the US as there were Central America.”

    From what I have read, it seems about 90% of slaves transported across the Atlantic went to English, French, Spanish, & Portugese plantations in the Caribbean and Central & South America. However, the survival rate for those slaves was poor, generally measured in single-figure years, because of the brutal treatment, over-work, and disease.

    The English slave plantations in North America were apparently the odd one out. Slaves generally lived fairly long lives and had offspring.

    This does not fit the NYT narrative, of course. However, it may be a factor in the relative numbers of ethnic blacks left in some Central & South American countries.

  27. I’m skipping ahead w/o reading the commentary to my commentary. I have great doubt–great doubt–great doubt–after sampling a few sentences staring with Kirk, that anyone will tell me something I don’t know, and have probably taught.

    My anecdote was of a sudden understanding of historical circumstance on the ground at a particular moment–in this case the 30th anniversary of German reunification. We had been in Berlin that weekend and then gone up the river. It was, if you will, a Henry Adams Mt St Michel moment.

    The experience was memorable and valuable not in the moronic “gotta watch out fer them Germans” sense, but exactly because I already know the background as well as or better than anyone here.

    Trust me, if I go back and read anything that’s 1) true, and 2) previously unknown to me, I’ll let y’all know.

  28. Leaving aside the very important issue of highly fertile immigrants (Mohammed is one of the most popular names for male babies in England, it is said), today’s young Europeans are on average not absorbing the same cultural aspirations as those of half a century ago

    A friend of mine, a famous British professor of surgery who is Jewish, told me a few years ago that he worried about the number of female medical students who had converted to Islam. These were English girls, not ethnics from Islamic countries or culture. They were also into serious Muslim practices such as not scrubbing arms in surgery. Burkas and all.

  29. ” They were also into serious Muslim practices such as not scrubbing arms in surgery. Burkas and all.”

    Which is something that caused a well-educated Muslima doctor I met once to froth at the mouth in rage over, BTW… The various idiocies that converts get up to when they take up new belief systems are usually way overboard for people who grew up in that system.

    The real concern there is that the British medical system didn’t and does not have the forthright courage to squash this idiocy in the first place. That doctor should have thrown those students out into the street, and out of the training program–As opposed to what he apparently did and simply “Tsk, tsk’d… Kids, these days…”. And, the other problem is that the hierarchy which should have enabled him to do that more than likely is scared spitless of standing up for the right thing, and simply acquiesced to these idiots ignorance.

    Most of the problems we have today with regards to these things is simply cowardice, and the fact that nobody wants to hold people accountable. I guarantee you that if you were idiot enough to tolerate these women not washing their hands and arms properly, yet still had the policy of “Yeah… You wanna do that? Fine; here’s your indemnity for the infections you created in your patients… You’re paying for it all, along with the damages for pain and suffering…”. Couple of hundred thousand pounds in damage assessments for causing secondary infections? Ones you couldn’t discharge through bankruptcy, and which would get taken out of any poverty benefits you might be eligible for as a bankrupt indigent former medical student…? I guarantee you that there’d be a hell of a lot more hand-washing going on, after the first time you actually bothered to enforce policies. “Oh, man… Did you hear what happened to Fatima?”.

    Problem is, the hierarchies are staffed mostly by cowards and poltroons.

  30. “Heck, we have no idea what racism is anymore.”

    Let me help. This thread is a great example of racism, by most of its contributors. ;)

  31. Y’all got it wrong. I stumbled into a bunch of blather about “Black Hebrew Israelites”. See, They were not dumped into the Atlantic Slave Trade because they were hostile, uncooperative, non-productive tribal trash. They were dumped because they were Hebrews/Jews. It ain’t “racism”, It is all “anti-Semitism”. Get your prejudices straight!

    See? The Black “Numidians”, the “real” Jews, scampered off into the jungle after they gone done looting Egypt. Them guyz in Palestine were White European “wannabees” that took over the brand name after the Black Hebrew Israelites trashed the place.

    You know that it is true. Just look at Detroit and Chicago.

    Them Black Hebrew Israelites were such an intelligent, industrious, hardly working group that the Yoruba, Ashante, Mandinka and Igbo just naturally hated their guts. All along the west African coast, it was always the same. “Sell dah Jews!”.

    And I used to think that the individuals that were sold into slavery (transferred, I read is the preferred term) were a useless, non-productive, and hostile pile of trash. Silly me. The west African tribes were just worried that the traveling Nubians would loot and destroy the tribes like they did to Egypt.

  33. @James the Lesser,

    I doubt we can quite work out what the realities were, from this standpoint. And, it’s utterly irrelevant. The real question is “What are they doing, today?”.

    That’s a story told best by FBI crime statistics and observation, bearing in mind that there’s a huge swath of data that doesn’t make its way into the records used for those stats.

    It suffices that black American conduct and values serve to reinforce the already-established self-justifications and prejudices of those still-native Africans that emigrate to America in modern times. I’ve heard those opinions, first-hand, and they aren’t what I’d call “pretty”. Not to mention, when someone tells you about his father being driven into bankruptcy after trying to “serve the community” in predominantly black areas, and then having his life casually ended by what was the last in a long string of successive armed robberies of those businesses? You really have to wonder if it is possible that the narrow view that first-generation Nigerian has of the issue might not have some bearing on things.

    In the end, it doesn’t matter where you came from or how you got here; the question is, what are you doing now? And, if you’re committing most of the crimes, what may we take from that? That’s the issue, not the stories told about antecedents.

    Black America has a huge problem, and its not one of anyone else’s making. Do remember that it was a deputation of “black community leaders” that went to Richard Nixon about the drug problem in their communities in the first damn place that got the “War on Drugs” going. It was the black community leadership that went to Joe Biden when he was in the Senate and demanded action over the “crack epidemic” that got the disparity going for crack vs. powder cocaine–They asked for it. And, now, decades later, they rue the fact that so many fellow blacks are in jail, completely missing the point that they’re there mostly because they asked for it, and, ohbytheway, those were the young black men preying on their own communities. Mostly… There was and is a lot of literal bleed-over.

    There’s an incredible level of hypocrisy, here–You can’t control your own community members, so you blame others after you ask them to tighten up the laws and their enforcement? WTF?

    This is why race relations are in the state they are. The media and the activists “forget” all these things, never report them in current discussions, and the rest of us who do remember and watch the current travesty are increasingly intolerant over the whole thing. I don’t care if the youth of your community are spending their time getting high; I do care that I can’t leave anything unsecured about my property because they’re stealing it to pay for the drugs they’re taking. I do care that I can’t park my damn car somewhere without it being broken in to, and that I can’t go walking through the parks late at night with my dogs. I’ve lived in or near “predominantly black communities” in the past; I won’t do so ever again.

    At some point, the normies are going to get fed up with all of this, and the formerly conventionally-decent people are going to say to themselves “Y’know… Them old-timey bigots that ran things back in the day…? They mighta’ been on to something… Maybe we ought to go back to lynching rapists and armed robbers, because the “Justice” system sure as hell isn’t coping with it…”.

    The day is probably coming back, right after George Soros gets every DA in the country replaced with the child of terrorists. At that point, you’ll see vigilante action overwhelm the system, and we’re all going to be a lot less happy because of it.

  35. One can gain some insight into the problem discussed here by reading “A New Theory of Human Evolution,” by Arthur Keith, available at archive.org. The theme of the book is a type of behavior noted by many long before it was published; the universal tendency of our species to perceive others in terms of ingroup and outgroup. According to Keith, the innate behavioral traits that are the root cause of what we refer to as morality incline us to apply different versions to the two groups. We display “good” behavior towards members of the ingroup, and hate, despise, deem impure, etc., members of the outgroup. When the behavior in question evolved, there was no ambiguity about the identity of the two groups. Our tribe was the ingroup, and the next tribe over was the outgroup. The trait in question tended to distance groups from each other, avoiding over-exploitation of resources in a given area.

    Today, you might say the behavior in question has become “dysfunctional.” We are aware of the existence of a myriad groups of different types, and can perceive any one of them as ingroup or outgroup. The chances that our choice will result in the same selective advantage as it did in the stone age are vanishingly small. Under the circumstances, supposing you place some value on genetic survival, it would probably be best to actually think about what your behavior will accomplish, instead of blindly responding to your emotions, which is the usual default for our species.

    I note in passing that Nassim Taleb claimed in all seriousness on Twitter that Claire Lehmann is a “neo-Nazi.” It confirmed my impression that he’s an over-inflated windbag.

  36. Helian/Doug Drake: “… supposing you place some value on genetic survival, it would probably be best to actually think about what your behavior will accomplish, instead of blindly responding to your emotions …”

    If one places any value on genetic survival, the first — Only! — thing to do is to have offspring.

    The underclass (of any skin hue or religion) are having babies, mostly paid for by the productive classes who are not having babies. Genetic evolution is very slow. cultural evolution is light-speed in comparison. But fast or slow, the direction is not in doubt.

  37. MIke-SMO mentions Black Israelites. There used to be British Israelites, too–perhaps still are for all know. The temptation to steal the juju of other tribes is perennial.

    It’s related to the notion in Western history of “Afrocentrism.” One scholar described it as the theory that the ancient Greeks stole their best ideas from the Africans, leaving the latter with none.

    I’ve noticed in my lifetime a definite fetishization of heritage. In my context that was ACWABAWS-focused but as that declines there’s a lot more emphasis on a real or imagined Scots, Scots-Irish, or generalized Celtic cultural identity.

  38. “I note in passing that Nassim Taleb claimed in all seriousness on Twitter that Claire Lehmann is a “neo-Nazi.” It confirmed my impression that he’s an over-inflated windbag.”

    Good lord. Did he give any specifics to justify this belief?

  39. Interesting book to read along the lines of what Helian mentions is “The Human Swarm” by Mark Moffett.

    Too much to quote in there, but he makes good cases and draws an awful lot of grim parallels with animal behavior. There’s a section where he discusses how chimpanzee societies fission and become enemies, and when you look at the state of the nation all around us…? Yeah.

    It’s worth a read, if only for the stuff he relates about observed animal behavior.

  40. he’s an over-inflated windbag

    He’s proved that it’s possible to be both a successful popularizer of important concepts about probability and risk and an over-inflated windbag. That has to count for something.

  41. Count me in with Jonathan. The Black Swan is a rich, deep and accessible look at what we think we know about probability and risk.

    He may be a fool about other topics, of course.

  42. Taleb is a classic example of someone who thinks “Well, I’m smart and I know a lot about my subject area of expertise… So, I must be an expert about everything else, too…”.

    Unfortunately, a lot of other people share in those delusions. Guy may know a lot about how to perform neurosurgery, but that ain’t the guy you necessarily want to go to for advice about how to build your house, either. He might have some interesting insights into the question, and he maybe even worked his way through medical school doing carpentry, but… You want a house built? Find a guy who builds houses for a living, then talk to him. Don’t seek homebuilding advice from your doctor.

    Part of the problem with the modern world and our adaptation to it is that we automatically assume “Expert in one area, expert in all…”. That is manifestly a false construct. It’s the same with celebrities: Why on God’s green earth does anyone think that some actor has any authority at all outside the narrow range of their play-acting on stage and screen? Why does anyone look at an athlete and say “Yeah, that’s the guy I’m gonna go to for knowledge about race relations…”?

    Frankly, I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t take any of these “spokespeople” seriously. You get on TV and make vast moral pronouncements? I’m automatically looking for the hand up your ass, moving your lips for you. And, oddly enough, I usually find one…

    Case in point? Our little heroine of the AGW scam, the sainted little Greta Thunberg. Is she a legit authority? Oh, hell no… But, you go looking, and she’s cited everywhere in the media as though she were. Whole thing is a massive scam and propaganda exercise–All the while, the people behind it are flying in chartered jets to exotic locations for their meetings about the “climate crisis” and living in mansions, making money off the scam.

    Prostitution makes mint, these days.

  43. @David

    “Good lord. Did he give any specifics to justify this belief?”

    Probably, but if so they were too absurd to be worth remembering.

    @Kirk

    “Taleb is a classic example of someone who thinks “Well, I’m smart and I know a lot about my subject area of expertise”¦ So, I must be an expert about everything else, too”¦”

    Exactly. I was impressed with “The Black Swan” as well, but his next book of “Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms” was a grab bag of banalities. He should have stuck with black swans and left the aphorisms to Rouchefoucauld.

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