Tribalism

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Tribalism is the bane of mankind.

If there really were no great civilizations before ours, the fault would be squarely laid at the feet of tribalism.

To the extent the West has managed to take humanity further — further away from want, further away from famine, further away from the misery of barbarism — it is because through a combination of historical, philosophical and religious circumstances, the west (some places to a higher extent than others) came to view humans as all (more or less) part of the same tribe. All “human.”

Because you see, in tribalism you don’t. Those people who are related to you, or look like you, or tie their flegfardt as you do are people. Everyone else, them over there, who wear their spoons sideways? They’re not human. They’re terrifying animals who look like humans but who are as likely to kill you and eat you as look at you.

In the deep past of mankind — AND STILL IN MUCH OF THE WORLD — your humanity is conditional on how close you resemble the tribe in question and sometimes on whether you were raised there.

In the US we joke that there are places like small town New England or places in the Appalachia where if you haven’t lived there three generations you’re foreigners. Many places in Europe are or were like that till recently, (at least the one I came from was submerged in “foreigners” sometimes literally, so it’s no longer like that) but that’s not what I am talking about. It is perhaps the narrow edge of it.

However in true tribalism, you really don’t consider the rest of humanity “human.” The corollary, by the way, is that you don’t consider yourself quite human. You’re a being of the group. Your identity, the fact that you’re human at all is wrapped up in this sometimes very small group of people. You only make sense in connection with them.

Even the place I came from was/is a bit like that. It’s the West, of course, and of course other people are human, but there is an overwhelming tendency to think of yourself only in relation to the family, the tribe and their needs.

But how does that hold civilization back, Sarah? Shouldn’t we think of others, of the family, of the people we love first?

Um….

One thing is interest in others, loving your neighbor. Another is to view yourself as owing an obligation to people you’re related to for the rest of your life.

As an arrangement I suppose it’s superior to a man alone in the Savannah with a knife. Which is why most human societies drifted to it. That and because it’s the natural state of Great Apes, which is what we are.

However– However–

Tribalism, codified and set in stone becomes binding. You can’t innovate, you can’t have private property, you can’t improve yourself because you belong to the tribe/the family/the group.

We’ve all heard of tribal societies where a member can’t open a store, because all others will demand things for free from the store.

Where I come from which is well past that stage, you’re still expected to do “favors” for your family (which makes all Latin societies inherently corrupt. Yes, the culture is the same.) And you’re expected “not to give yourself airs” and not to act like you’re better than “your people.” And this is in Europe.

To the extent America became the engine of innovation and improvement of human life it is because, for various reasons, we got over tribalism.

Fully? no. Fully might be impossible so long as humans are humans. We are not angels, but apes who dream of angels.

However in America the ideal is to live with others as though every other were as human as you are, regardless of looks, attitude, etc. In America, the ideal is you deal fairly with everyone, and you have laws that apply to everyone equally.

Now, this doesn’t always apply, and it’s always at its worst when we get a large influx of immigrants, all at once. There were Irish and Italian immigrant ghettos, and of course you favored your kind if you could. “Of course” because you’re human. And there was a large unassimilated lump of people that were closer to each other than the rest, and under stress. of course they clung and acted tribal.

Still do with the latest imports. Perhaps worse with the latest imports, because America is under attack internally too, as well as externally.

The wave of people brought in to submerge the culture in ever increasing numbers was an attack. Of course it was. A highly innovative form of asymmetric warfare. but so was the insidious corruption of our laws and institutions which were supposed to assimilate and integrate the newcomers.

Instead of people being encouraged to learn English, they were catered to in their original language. Something that kept them tribal and clinging to those who understood them, and also dependent on the government catering to them.

People were encouraged to cling to their customs, from the innocuous — clothing, food, music — to the noxious — considering the long-ago-left-behind-countries better than the US — to the damaging, like honor killings or child marriage. Everyone else was told to oppose any one of these things, or to wish your neighbors didn’t play salsa music in the yard day and night (an actual example from a recentish article) was “racist” because “silence” was white. Somehow.

So were things like being punctual, frugal and clean. The bourgeois virtues that lifted the poor of the west out of poverty were now discouraged in new immigrants. People who demanded them from new immigrants were called racists. And the immigrants themselves were made to feel guilty if they tried to fit in.

A few years ago, someone nominally on our side also an immigrant said it made perfect sense that I’d completely acculturated (except for the d*mn accent) because “Women always adopt their husband’s tribal customs.” He’s not exactly wrong, at that, because of course evolutionarilly that is what was selected for, since women were often either traded or war spoils. It favored survival.

Except that if that were the case, my husband would have adopted half of my original culture, or more, because that’s what everyone from neighbors to colleagues to schools pushed us to do. I was told I came from a beautiful old culture — with absolutely no interest in why then I’d choose to come here. There is a curious blindness among the elite left, where they think prosperity is a function of location, not of what you do there — and my husband — whose ancestors have been here since the first European arrivals (save for the ones who met them on the shore) –got shamed for not learning Portuguese. A language, mind you, that had absolutely no use in our daily life.

As late as our youngest being in Middle School, schools assumed that “of course” we spoke Portuguese exclusively at home.

Those are the pressures against assimilating. Not, of course, that my family much cared, because we are Odd, which means while we’re aware of the way we’re being pushed, being pushed just annoys us. If anything it makes us less likely to go that way. So I acculturated, even when it felt like dying. My husband — to the extent being a mathematician, that he’s even aware of social pressures and dictates — became more intensely American. Our family went all out for the High Holy Holidays (for those not read in, that’s the Fourth of July, though we also do a thing for Valley Forge that involves biting off the heads of gingerbread Hessian soldiers on Christmas.) The 4th of July was the kids’ favorite holiday because we had the biggest party we could muster. Every year. And the kids were raised on the founding documents and American history and the ethos of America and why we were different and better than the rest of the world.

Which probably makes them rather odd ducks, since the rest of the kids in school are hearing why America is worse. And also why white people suck. (And the definition of white is more “behaves in a middle class way” so that Asian immigrants are considered white two generations in.) And are responsible for the evil in the world.

I think the left said between that and encouraging arrant tribalism in all the newcomers they’d get us back into a tribal society.

Tribal societies are easy to control. You keep the groups stoked one against the other. And then you rule on top of the mud heap.

It didn’t work that way. Oh, sure, there are people still stuck in that mind set, notably a lot of Democrat congressmen and women. But the man and woman on the street? Not so much. Latins didn’t vote for illegal immigration, even if the idea is fostered that most of those coming in illegally are Latin. (No longer largely the case.)

And then there’s the fact the left has never understood people who look alike to THEM can have very deep divisions. And that there’s no way in hell all people who tan are going to unite against “the white” because frankly they view the other people who tan as more of a problem.

That’s the fractious side. But there’s the other side.

Humans in proximity with other humans meld, meet and reproduce. Regardless of how much those near them try to stop them. That’s humans. We’re randy apes.

It is not rare or even noteworthy for me to find myself some public place and see a family that’s clearly an amalgam of several different points-of-origin. Oh, sure, sometimes those points of origin are all in Africa or all in Europe (though that’s rare, frankly) but even then they are the type of family that could only occur in America. More usually there are people of European, Asian, African and indefinable origins interacting as family, with kids passed around from lap to lap. Even in highly ethnic and relative recent immigrant places, like our favorite Mexican restaurant, I’ve seen a Latin family with quite obviously an Asian daughter in law and grandchild.

People meld. People mingle. By and large and more and more with the ease of travel, people are a genetic kludge. BUT and this is very important, people are American.

Yes, even now, despite all the pressures to the contrary, these people interact as Americans.

During the never-ending June driving around, I found myself at a hotel breakfast with a bunch of teen basketball players. Their unifying characteristic is that all of them made me feel like a midget. And yes, a lot of them were very very dark. But a lot were tall blonds, and looked either Germanic or Irish or yes. (Yes, growing up in Europe I can indeed tell you those features are all different.) They interacted as friends. Or in some cases frienemies, but despite all the push to view themselves as widgets who are a race/a skin color/a set of features FIRST the divisions were nowhere that clear cut.

And I literally couldn’t imagine that scene anywhere else.

Now, before you guys think I’ve lost my mind. I still think that illegal immigration is bad and bad for us. When I say these people were used as a weapon, I don’t mean they were brought in for our good. Perhaps they allowed some companies to pay lower amounts to their work force, but at the same time we were paying vast (vaster than I think we’ll ever know) amounts in social net payments to enable that.

And we were paying other prices, since other countries flooded us with the worst of their worst. Crime, lawlessness, all in turn leading to greater tribalism.

And of course, since Jimmy Carter and some crazy court decision saying tests with different outcomes are discriminatory, people have been forbidden from administering tests to job applicants. This fostered credentialism; the explosion of the diploma factory universities (and at this point even the ivies are diploma factories) AND nepotism. (If you can’t trust anyone, hire your friend/cousin/neighbor.)

Given that and systems that rewarded a work force that was anything but white male, it all became a spoils system that discriminated against whites and hardest against white males.

So now you have a lot of very intelligent people who, having been pounded their entire lives with the idea they mustn’t be racist and must be open to every skin color and culture have decided the solution to society’s ills is…. tribalism.

For the love of suffering succotash people! I know some of you have a brain. I’ve seen you use it. But in this? In this you’re “thinking” — I use the term loosely — with your toenails, or perhaps your spleen.

Tribalism is impossible to eliminate and to an extent, yes, we suffer from tribalism. And people, particularly displaced recent immigrants will take advantage.

But–

You can’t complain about people favoring their tribesmen from “places where they shit on the streets” and then want to have MORE TRIBALISM HERE.

Listen, let me spell it out for you: WHAT MAKES THE WEST BETTER IS NOT THE FACT THAT MOST OF YOU NEED SPF 3005 SUNBLOCK or some other f*cking alien type of thing to protect you from the sun. It’s not your blue eyes. It’s not your blond hair.

Hitler’s illusions notwithstanding, throughout the Middle Ages Germany was considered the most backward country in Europe, and part of the setup for the long war of the twentieth century was their just having pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unified and wanting a warm water port in the worst way. (Literally.)

Skin color is not magic. There might be some genetic advantages to Neanderthal genetic inheritance, including a tendency to not be quite so tradition bound and more creative. Maybe. Evidence is unclear. Shake the magic eight ball of shards of pottery and bits of bone, and ask again.

Culture does matter. And the Western culture of “all human shaped things are human” and “We’ll give them the same chance under the law” did best for ALL HUMANS. The American version of “Equal under the law and give them a chance” did particularly well when combined with mobility both physical and social that allowed the exceptional to shine.

So why am I hearing rumblings about how we need a more collectivist mind set and we need to be tribal?

Mostly because people aren’t thinking. Partly because they are interacting with people who still live in the worst shit holes of the universe and either tell them how wonderful the place is, or pretend they aren’t living there and tell them how bad the US is.

Because of course, the practices of the places where you shit on the street will become MAGICALLY improved if you remove melanin. Yep. That’s super-plausible, isn’t it? No, I’m not calling you a racist. I’m calling you stupid.

If your skin color is so fucking superior and gifts you with automagic thinking powers, prove it. Do better at things by virtue of it. That means you don’t need a hand up or a handout, and you don’t need nepotism in your favor. Just a fair playing field. (And perhaps not even that, if you’re superior enough.)

And here’s the part I plain don’t get — just don’t get — Trump’s administration has made it possible to test people for government jobs again. And you know where government jobs go, the rest will follow.

This is not just a killing blow for the Academic stupidity, but, combined with stomping hard on DEI and the very concept of racial favoritism, and the closing of the borders and making work visas harder to obtain for a while, we stand a chance of clawing back to a society that’s primarily meritocratic.

Which we badly need because, listen to me, if you hire people for ANY REASON other than competence, competence will degrade and disappear. Yes, yes, you see the “affirmative action” hires, and you think competence is in the crapper in general because they can tan.

I have bad news for you. If you give preference to tall, pale blonds (in anything but modeling) you’ll be in the same place in three generations. The schools will not demand as much of them, because they must give them good grades; the people who hire will hire them even if they can barely read; and once on the job they will not do anything, because a) it’s not required. b) no one taught them how to.

If you just said “Well, fine, at least it will be my people” you have traded in your brain for a pancake. And the pancake is flat and lacking syrup.

If I didn’t have descendants, and if I didn’t come from an exceptionally long-lived line, I’d just smirk, sit back and buy marshmallows to roast on the fires of the dying civilization as we head back to tribalism for the long count.

Except that I do both. And that I don’t think the intellectuals who are now declaiming for “community” and “tribalism” are winning this one. Because again, people on the street don’t care for your triumphalist arguments.

They care for what works. And tribalism, in the long run, works for nothing but making people mad and resentful. And insular, very insular.

So why are all these people trying to push us in that direction and convincing us there’s no other hope, even as the things propping up this — pardon me — shitty regime are being pulled down by the administration? Even as people are becoming free to compete individually and on an even playing field again?

Why the big push the other way, the clamor of voices?

Isn’t it a coincidence we’re being told “We need affirmative action for OUR side” even as affirmative action is finally being relegated to the dust bin of history?

Oh, you’ll say but it’s “American Heritage” bloodline, because that is those who understand liberty and representative government.

Which is very cute. Husband comes as close to qualifying for that as you’re going to get (People who fully qualify for that, all eleven of them, have 30 toes per foot. And play the banjo really well.) He’s an exception to their political leanings. Most of them are blue-blooded communists. Because they prize “making the right high class noises” and “having the right high class thoughts” above all else, and thanks to Academia and the last century, most of those noises and thoughts have been Marxist.

Years ago, we had this glass fronted bookcase that our cat D’Artagnan (nickname Slinky McEvil) had learned to open and close. (Bear with me. yes, it is relevant.)

We don’t quite know how, but we kept finding Havey cat confined to the bottom shelf of this bookcase. Reconstructing the crime, we assumed that D’Artagnan had put Havey’s toy in there, leaving the door open, and when Havey got in, D’Artagnan slammed the door on him.

This happened at least twice a day, every day. We kept explaining to Havey “This cat doesn’t have your best interests at heart. This cat is not your friend.” And yet, it happened again and again, till older son (whose cat D’Artagnan was) moved out taking the bad element (now gone, and lamented) with him.

Havey-cat has some excuse, since he spent his kittenhood in a mini golf course where people hit him on the head with golf clubs for playing with the balls.

I don’t think most of you have that excuse. I mean, they don’t abandon kids at mini golf courses, and if they did the kid would die rather than live on bugs and feature water.

What’s more, you have all the history of humanity at your disposal. You can read (most of you.) Unlike Havey cat, you can learn from the mistakes of history and the rest of the world.

And yet it never occurs to you the people pushing tribalism, division, and an inversion of the already dysfunctional system in place are not your friends and don’t have your best interests at heart. It never occurs to you that changing the power sign means nothing because HIRING OR FIRING FOR ANY REASON BUT COMPETENCE LEADS TO LACK OF COMPETENCE.

It never occurs to you that a state of tribalism will need a strong state to mediate the spoils and keep the tribes from each other’s throat.

And that we’re dying form a too-strong state.

It never occurs to you that people throwing fits against individualism and individual striving and achievement don’t have America (or the West’s) best interests at heart.

Havey-cat has an excuse. What’s yours?


227 thoughts on “Tribalism”

  1. Well, I’ve dated multiple levels of “suntan” and discovered that someone born roughly 5,700 miles from where I was is more compatible than even those born in the same hospital with either of us,

    I’m “racist”, though. I favor the human race over imaginary “snail darters” or “delta smelt”.

    May God bless us all with wisdom.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Ah yes, the dating thing. Holy crap.

      Being -old- I can safely say that after a thorough sampling of local talent here in Ontario, I concluded that they were ALL CRAZY and not one of them was to be trusted. I have stories. Therefore I branched out to the import models.

      Like magic, I found one that could cook, count, and have an adult-level discussion about money and other serious things without resorting to crying, pouting and emotional blackmail.

      Surface albedo doesn’t mean much against all that, let me tell you.

      So today I’m off to pick up my new motorcycle. My import model told me to shut up and go buy one, right now, because it puts a smile on my stupid face and I’m not going to live forever.

      Where are you going to find that kind of quality in a locally grown product?

      Liked by 4 people

      1. God bless you both. You got a good one.

        On a less happy note, what the everlasting %$#! is this thing about not hiking? Someone posted a sign from Halifax, of all places. (Been to Halifax, walked the trails, think it’s flaming nonsense).

        Liked by 3 people

        1. From what I’ve seen, the official excuse is fire danger. Like every day hiker is going to set a whacking great bonfire as he sits down for a drink of water and some gorp.

          Either that, or TPTB are using the trails for some interesting/illegal/immoral/fattening activities and they don’t want any witnesses. /sarc(?)

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          1. Odds are real good that’s an attempt to discourage people from walking where the muggers are, with a plausible excuse they can’t be expected to stop.

            You know, like airlines blaming weather for delays caused by lousy maintenance/scheduling. Weather delays don’t trigger hotel and meal reimbursement.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Well, since the totalitarian Ottawa Oligarchs don’t want any serfs, err citizens, to be able to defend themselves, since they don’t have an equivalent of our 2nd Amendment, there’s not much more they can do other than ban people from doing anything.

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          2. The official excuse of fire danger wasn’t taking, especially after someone else convicted of setting wildfires in another part of Canada got zero jail time and not even a fine, while a disobedient hiker got mulcted over twenty-five grand. So the new official excuse out East appears to be that you’ll fall and hurt yourself in the woods, and it’s unfair to emergency services to have to expend time, effort, and money to come and rescue you.

            If you’re not believing this, which is to say if you have sense, I leave this link:

            It’s For Your Safety – small dead animals

            (I did not actually watch the video, because I can tell that listening to that person would cost me both IQ and SAN points.)

            Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

            Et, don’t make me add a line for Canada.

            Liked by 2 people

            2. The utopia of the progressive left: where the criminal is protected and the innocents always pay. It shouldn’t be possible to get literally everything that matters completely backwards, but somehow the progs manage.

              Liked by 2 people

            3. As long as the line specifies Ottawa and the various provincial capitals, I’m cool with it.

              or maybe Libertas pro Canada

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          3. It *was* “fire”. Now it’s “you might break your leg while hiking in an area where a fire starts, and it would be difficult to get you out safely and in time.”

            I wish I were joking…

            Liked by 1 person

        3. From the National Post, the situation:

          “On Tuesday, [Nova Scotia] Premier Tim Houston announced travel and activity restrictions in the woods due to rising wildfire risks from persistent hot and dry weather, including making all trail systems through woods off limits. He added that it’s fine to take short trails, such as those from parking lots to beaches and lakes.

          Other measures announced and also listed in the Department of Natural Resources release include banning outdoor activities in the forests and restricting camping to designated sites.

          The ban will remain in place until mid-October or weather improves, and violators face fines of $25,000.”

          I have heard from YouTube that there’s already one guy charged with the $25,000 fine, he called the cops on himself to get it into court. I think they charged him in his own back yard, he went into the woods out the back a few feet and dared them.

          Because really, -can- the premier of a province blanket ban everybody from going in the woods? Is that a thing, in Canada?

          Newfoundland also issued a ban on going in the woods, theirs is even more ridiculous. Fire risk is not the reason. Their premier said, and I quote, “If you go in the woods and break your leg we won’t come and get you, because we’re fighting fires. So you can’t go, because its a safety thing.“

          https://x.com/Tablesalt13/status/1955026795901628592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

          Being a Canadian, I do not find this at all surprising. Infuriating certainly, but I know that this is how they are. One school kid trips over his shoelaces outside at break, next day nobody can go outside. Province-wide.

          There are supposedly sober, responsible and reasonable people out there right now, today, arguing in support of this ban on going in the woods. It’s the -reasonable- course of action, you know. Somebody might toss a cigarette butt on the ground and burn the province down you know.

          People are stupid. They must be controlled.

          The other thing is that these political types got a taste of how sweet it is to just ban everybody from everything during Covid, and they’re all lusting after a chance to do it again. They LOVE it!

          But on the other hand, in a different province some guy started 30 fires and got probation. For realz.

          So yeah. That’s Canada right now. Government locks down the population INSTEAD of doing forest management.

          This is why I love #TheDonald. He’s kicking these people in the b***s every week.

          Liked by 3 people

          1. Yes, I too am afraid the control freaks got such a rush of power during the Covidiocy that they are absolutely panting (like a junkie hitting withdrawal pains) to lock all the things … again.

            I’m absolutely certain that they are looking over at China and considering the latest epidemic, wondering and hoping that they can do it all again.

            The National Establishment Media, of course, can be counted on to try and scare the ever-loving snot out of the public again.

            Of course. Panic=Eyeballs=$$$ … and maybe a bit of credibility, again.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. Comrade, I am sure that they are motivated by benevolent good will towards us.

              I must go out and be utterly trusting and gullible towards all.

              Liked by 2 people

        4. Waiiiiit, what?

          Huh. In June, we met some Pacific Crest Trail hikers in Yosemite who were 900 miles in to their journey of the whole shebang. (They hadn’t known each other before starting and were from three different countries, but 900 miles will make you good friends.) By standard trail time calculations, that means they’ll be in Canada soon. I hope they don’t get blindsided by that nonsense. That would be a sucky end to an epic journey.

          Liked by 2 people

    2. I also favor humans. Though judging from some relatives some of my family favored gorillas. It explains the massive heads I bequeathed my kids. And the shoulders…. AHHHHHHHH. Those shoulders. I have PTSD

      Liked by 1 person

  2. This (about Britain) seems entirely relevant regarding the importation of other tribal beliefs – https://newsfromuncibal.substack.com/p/the-land-that-forgot-about-wolves

    But I actually think that the US is not entirely unique in the general lack of tribalism. Britain and most of its colonies are not that far off. (White) British football fans/hooligans have fought foreign fans that did monkey impressions mocking British players of darker hues, for example.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. Colorado is literally importing literal wolves, and refusing to allow the woodcutter/rancher to dispatch them when they, predictably, kill calves and lambs.

      The good news is, at least two have wandered into Wyoming, where they are sane, and have been quickly shot and skinned; and two are known to have been killed by mountain lions. I’ve always liked mountain lions (I have been fortunate enough to see two of them in the urban/wildland interface) and now I like them even more.

      The Colorado Ballet would probably perform the new Little Red Riding Hood unironically. If the Denver Symphony were to perform Peter and the Wolf, I’m sure the Wolf would be the hero, not white European Peter.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. India was a colony of the UK, but the population density may have had a different effect with regard to cultural influence. South Africa is also an interesting case study. Yet, a remarkable number of current commonwealth nations are seemingly much less screwed up.

      UK has room for some ‘yes but also no’ in that sort of discussion.

      We are talking cultural mutation, and memetic factors, some of which are preserved.

      The root stock for America was good.

      The sort of mixing situation that created the basic culture was something that has occurred probably many times before, with average or with terrible results.

      A key part of the recipe is that we were mixing or averaging European cultures that had a heavy Christian influence. They had stuff in common, so there were common denominators available, and also the various imperial histories meant some cross pollination of legal and political ideas.

      I thinkt hat, hwoever, religion is very important.

      Peace consensus in the US around religion, and the peace consensus in the UK around religion seem to be a bit distinct, and may have had a minor effect of divergent evolution.

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      1. The fact that “peace around MY religion/denomination” was a primary factor in much of the root-stock self-selection for the founding settlement of these States, and that nearly all of those were some form of Christian and usually Protestant, with its premise of Individual Accountability To God and the logical societal and political implications of this, probably had an outsized effect in the anti-Tribalism department on this side of the pond.

        (Except for Canada. I take no responsibility for Canada.)

        Liked by 1 person

  3. You can make the case that the reason we are being attacked and that the Russians, Europeans, Chinese etc. are trying to tear us down is tribalism. “How dare the Americans be better than us? We need to pull them back down into the scrum pit and teach them a lesson.” And, they want to be the ones to rise to the top of the cesspit. But, we’re better than them and, God being just, will rise better and stronger than before.

    Liked by 2 people

  4. “In the US we joke that there are places like small town New England or places in the Appalachia where if you haven’t lived there three generations you’re foreigners.”

    I lived in Small Town Minnesota for a while, and while everyone is “friendly” you’re not really one of them unless you went to high school there. That seemed to be the thing.

    Also, the “friendly” thing is pretty complicated. You get invited if you’re “new,” but the invitations kind of drop off after a while if you’re not enthusiastic about volunteering for the Corn Festival or whatever. I thought it was weird, honestly. We made a lot of “people of the corn” jokes. I don’t live there anymore. ~:D

    In Canada we do it different. When you’re new, we offer polite greetings and then ignore the f- out of you, because we’ve got stuff to do and we don’t really like each other that much. (Canadians are standoffish, judgemental b@st@rds, never let anyone tell you different.) If you muck in and work like you mean it, -then- you get included. It helps if your kid plays hockey, but not that much.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. We get something like that in $TINY_TOWN east of the Cascades. Until people have lived here for 2 winters, nobody counts on them staying around, so they’re ignored a bit. (People who have green winters most affected.)

      Liked by 1 person

  5. As for New England this little bit of Downeast humor sums up their view of the world

    https://youtu.be/njNQQ-2jhwQ

    As the Narrator says there are three basic classes of people to a New Englander. First there are Transients (i.e. those Come from Away) who come only for a time (even if that time is 20 years). Then there are Transplants, Those who Came from Away but who have shown the wisdom to recognize what a piece of paradise this is and stay. And finally there are the Natives (and you know who you are). And please note that although Transplants may have children in the locale those children are NOT Natives. As the gent in the video says ” If your cat had kittens in the oven you wouldn’t call them Biscuits, now would yah?”

    In fact I, a Connecticut native with ancestors going back well into the late 17th Century, am a transplant here in my little North Shore Massachusetts town. We New Englanders can be pretty darned insular. That said, New Englanders may have a gruff exterior but at least the Natives and Transplants in the towns will come a running if someone needs help. The cities mostly have lost that although that New England spirit still shows up If you’re in sections amongst the “Townies” that have been there a couple generations.

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    1. Yeah. Dan, also a Connecticut native, (Our sons are the first not born in the same town since the 17th century) has told me that. As I type this I’m giggling, because you two are probably cousins.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. If any of Dan’s relatives track to Hammonasset (or variant spelling Hommonascitt) Originally Kenilworth later Killingworth and Clinton then it is very likely. Particularly the Kelsey family who were part of the founding of Hartford Ct and later moved down to the Hammonasset plantation ~1663. Mr WIlliam Kelsy and his sons (and daughters) and their descendents get spread all over the state. There is actually a group the Kelsey Kindred that tracks descendents (https://www.thekelseykindred.org/).

        Oddly the gentleman that married my sister in law is from the Kelsey family and so he is like a 7th or 8th cousin(of some flavor, possibly several removes) or so and my nephew and two nieces are cousins, and to my daughters they are also first cousins and some other degree of cousin. In New England, family trees have a tendency to look like Möbius strips…

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Good old Boston, the land of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells talk only to Cabots and the Cabots talk only to God.

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        4. I don’t know where the Applegate clan first landed on the east back in the 16th century. 450th year (2028) supposedly is coming up. East coast has been reaching out to aunt on planning to get those who came west to come celebrate with those who stayed east. Tours of historic homes and cemetery included.

          Names other than Applegate? I can’t keep all of what amounts to 4th cousin names here on the west coast straight. Or even all the current generations that are 2nd cousins. Aunt has been one of the local family historians (along with Shannon Applegate, 4th cousin – Yoncolla Charles & Melinda Applegate House) with their apprentices, at least for the western contingent and Applegate Trail.

          Mom’s side has a few too. Do not know when they hit the eastern shores except that side was here to take part in the USAian side of the revolution. Know enough that supposedly great-grandma married “down” after it was thought she’d be a spinster keeping herself by being an artist. They moved to Montana 1913 when she was pregnant with their youngest (grandpa), supposedly because “he’d ran through ‘her’ money”. Don’t know when grandma’s family moved to Montana either, other than she was born in Montana, raised by her mother and step-father, after her father died.

          Liked by 2 people

        5. The week a cousin of mine married, we found an ancestor of the name of her bridegroom up the family tree. Then, they would be something like nineth cousin if they were in the same generation, and he was also descended from this man.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. How did Shoim put it in Alma’s Familiar Generations?

            “You can get married in all 50 states, not just Alabama!” 😇😏

            Liked by 1 person

  6. “…we also do a thing for Valley Forge that involves biting off the heads of gingerbread Hessian soldiers on Christmas.”
    A hilarious custom that I need to take up!

    As to the thrust of your essay, I agree wholeheartedly. When Hilary promoted the attitude of, “It takes a village to raise a child,” I shuddered. Yes, it sounds reasonable on the surface. You can always use help from grandparents and aunts and uncles especially because some of your kids make take after an aunt or uncle more than they do you as a parent, but that whole notion screams TRIBALISM! in huge letters, and tribalism is evil. One of the great successes of Christianity is Christ’s emphasis on individual accountability. If you lie to get your nephew a job, you don’t get a pass for that as you do in a tribal society. Christianity may not be totally anti-tribal, but many of the essentials are, “Let the dead bury the dead, but you proclaim the kingdom of God,” and the answer to, “Who is my neighbor?” In Christianity, “You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley. You’ve got to walk it by yourself. Ain’t nobody else can walk it for you. You’ve got to walk it by yourself.”

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    1. I phrase it as “yes, it takes a village to raise a child. Not a government. And would the government kindly please stop doing all the things that destroy villages?”

      It’s like the “15 minute walkable city.” I basically live in a 15 minute city. They’re called rural towns. More people could live in them if the various levels of government would work together to make it easier to start businesses, including light manufacturing.

      The problem is not leftist goals. The problem is that leftist goals are excuses for leftist policies, which are totalitarian and evil. But if the devil didn’t sell that sizzle, no one would buy the shit steak.

      Liked by 6 people

      2. I live I. A walkable city, OK town, all,of 45 minutes outside NYC. Thing is no one does, walk that is. The wife and I, being NYC kids, chose the house we live in because you could walk it, but again, no one over the age of 16 does. Except us … and the looks we get when crossing at lights.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Once upon a time (late 1996? early 1997?) a former $WorkPlace sent me to L.A. (Manhattan Beach, actually)for something. I didn’t have any credit card at the time, so arrangements were made to have me stay a walkable distance (by MY definition – a mile or two is NO problem) from where I needed to be for a few days. For a week, it seemed like I was one of two pedestrians in the area.

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        2. My ideal is a walkable town. We could where we are, but no one does, and it’s only so often I can get a car stopping and asking if I had a breakdown….
          So. Next house, I guess, if there’s one.

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          1. LOL! Oddly enough though I live in a very large, very spread out city, I live close enough that I can walk to the grocery store, pharmacy, and even some decent restaurants. Working myself up enough to walk to the gym that’s a mile away. :)

            Reason I can do that is that my beloved wife refused to share me with a 2 hour each way daily commute, so we reconciled ourselves to being renters for life–or until one of us struck it rich off our writing. :)

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Speck is a walkable town, more or less. I’m one minute from a gas station walking, ten from a grocery story, and thirty from a hospital on foot. Plenty of little restaurants starting to pop back up after the Covidiocy. Still a few bad apples in the low-rent hollers- you know the ones with the beat up trailers that look a stiff breeze from falling to sticks.

            Then there’s me, right in the middle. The crazies up the holler walk by my house to get their cheap booze from the gas station. The cops blaze right by my house on their way to the weekly roundup of disreputable sorts. And down the way, off to the right a stretch is the nice little old people that stop to chat and give the fuzzmonsters a few scritches. They don’t go up the holler, but turn around right where my house is. For good reason.

            The crackheads and methed out losers know better than to mess with my property and my cats. They keep their shenanigans up the holler, to themselves. They’re slightly smarter than the squirrely nation. Those ones keep trying to colonize the Christmas tree in the front yard. Thus far they have continually failed, one or two squirrely communists at a time.

            I bought the place because it was a cheap fixer upper. The neighbors decided they won’t leave until I do, which is fine by me. They spoil the boys when the fuzzballs come over for a visit.

            Appalachia is home. The folk may be idiosyncratic and a little crazy, sure, but they’re like family the most of them. We’ve got a goodly influx of new residents fleeing more liberal areas, the most of them. By and large they’ve been nice people.

            Town’s not growing by much, though. That’s fine by me. I’ve been all over, seems like. This place is where I will, by Himself’s will, die. And so some other soul will step into the place I’ve called home and make it their own. Until the day the earthquakes come back to Appalachia and fire rains from the sky, well, my kith and kin will be stubbornly clinging to these little mountains, though. And maybe a stretch after, too.

            Liked by 2 people

  8. Did the US eliminate tribalism or did it redefine it. By that I mean the US is a tribe, but it is a tribe anyone can belong to just by adopting its values. One DIL was born in Mexico, the second in Vietnam. Both are Americans now. US citizens and proud to be part of the tribe. Both of my grandfathers came here from Greece. They became US citizens (my paternal grandfather through blood, earning US citizenship and a Purple Heart through service with the US 36th Infantry Division in France during World War I) and were proud of being Americans.

    Sarah joined the American tribe, too. She may not be eligible to become President, but she is a member of the US tribe and proud of it.

    You cannot go to Japan and become Japanese or to Germany and become German. Anyone can come to the US and become American through voluntarily joining the US tribe. And by joining I do not mean just getting the piece of paper stating you are a citizen. I mean adopting its values and living them.

    Rome did the same thing. Anyone could become a Roman citizen becoming a member of the Roman tribe. Ancient Greece? You come from a different city and you were not just not a citizen of the polis, you were not fully human and not really Greek. Rome’s fall was sealed when it permitted the German tribes pushing into Rome to remain without assimilating. If it permitted the Goths to enter, disarmed them and settled them elsewhere (common practice for centuries with entering tribe) and let them become Romans things would have gone better.

    That’s the real problem will illegals. The enter the US without intending to join the US tribe.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. One became a Legionary, thence Roman. Thence mustered out somewhere else to Romanize that frontier.

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    2. There remains a rather modest form of, let’s call it “defanged” tribalism in the US. I am goth. That’s a tribe. I’m an SF/Fantasy fan. Another tribe. Back in the day I was a “barfly” as in “Baen’s Bar” until I just didn’t have time to stay with that. Yet another tribe. Autistic. Discovering that that’s still yet another tribe. But but none of those unperson people who aren’t of the same tribe or tribes. Even the far greater tribe of USAan doesn’t (mostly–commies may be an exception ;) ) unperson people not of that tribe.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Tribes of affinity are different. And yes, that one is not particularly poisonous, because it’s not a birth-tribe. You can pick it. And you can change it later.
        I’m very much SF/F and well neuroatypical tribe. The sort of people I say “I don’t eat gravy because of texture” and they don’t try to convince me to “just try.”

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      2. “goths”, fen, and autisitcs are not tribes. Neither are techies, geeks or nerds. They are very loose groupings, labels, interests, fashions, and “brands”. There isn’t an comprehesive culture or a common set of values that even encompasses the majority of each of those groups. Most don’t even associate with each other outside of smallish gatherings.

        You might as well group people that cook meals at home or drive automobiles as a “tribe”.

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      3. I’d say probably the closest things that the U.S. has to tribes are the various sports fandoms. You wear your tribe’s colors; you eat, sleep, and breathe their success; you roar as they engage in battles with other tribes and lord your success over the enemy.

        But even there, most people know where to stop. Yes, you get the occasional issue like the Dodgers fan who got beaten up in Giants Stadium a while back, but that’s rare. I remember an experiment where someone decked a car out in the paraphernalia of the University of Alabama, and then pulled it to the side of the road next to the University of Auburn, pretending they’d had a breakdown and seeing if any Auburn fans would stop to help. (Yes, they did).

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Then there was the unhinged ‘Bama fan who poisoned the lovely oak trees at Toomer’s Corner in Auburn. (He then called Paul Feinberg’s talk show to brag about it.).

          ‘Bama fans and the university rallied round to try and help. The trees did not survive, but Auburn was able to get seeds from their descendants and replant.

          back in the last bad round of tornadoes, Auburn grads ran clothing drives for ‘Bama.

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        2. Hmm. Hadn’t heard of a Dodgers fan being attacked in SF, but Brian Stow was attacked and severely injured in 2011 at Dodger Stadium (parking lot) – https://abc7.com/post/bryan-stow-giants-fan-attacked-dodger-stadium-beaten-at-the-ballpark/13756451/

          Giants fans are so laid back, I’m sure they barely notice other teams’ fans; at least in 2011 the Giants were a good team. In another rebuilding year now, just not a lot of excitement, lots of empty seats; attendees are just not fanatics.

          49ers fans seem a bit more fervent – and they seem to drink a lot more, overall. But we only ever went to 2 games, though my wife and her AAUW group sold beer at Candlestick to raise money for a long time.

          Raider Nation in Oakland was pretty enthusiastic; don’t know about during their exile in LA or wherever the heck they are now.

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          1. Sometimes the attacks aren’t fandom related– the attacks in the bathrooms at the Seahawks games in Seattle were opportunity based, they went for older guys at the urinals when nobody else was in there.

            It took a while to identify that, though, usually you don’t get a cross-sample of several attacks.

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    3. Not just the illegals. We stopped insisting on assimilation, on the one hand, and allowed too fast an intake to assimilate even if the process had been left strong.

      There are also cultures which refuse to assimilate, such as Muslims.

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        1. Yep. “Why don’t you speak your home language at home? Why aren’t you raising those boys in your culture (not realizing that you actually are)?” etc. My cousins, who look asian, get the same. As do my black cousins. And the actual Brazilian cousins. But all of them, wherever their ancestors came from, came here and are fiercely proud of being Americans, damn the rest.

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          2. Happened all the time to my friend in grad school, whose mom was born in America after her parents immigrated. All these lily-white proto-SJWs (this was back in 2001), including a “Native American” woman whiter than I am, telling him he was failing “represent his culture” and constantly picking at him because he had the audacity to study medieval European literature and history while looking Japanese.

            But they might have been onto something, at least as far as success in academia, because the only really successful academician to come out of our cohort was…this…specimen: https://search.brave.com/search?q=asao+inoue

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                1. As the jolly folks over at the Babylon Bee keep finding out. :-D

                  When some idiot Democrat (redundant, I know) claims that 93 million Americans are ‘killed by Gun Violence!’ every day — you can’t make that shit up. Or some Tik-Tok ‘influencer’ proclaims that socialism beats capitalism 97% of the time. At what? Filling mass graves?

                  Liked by 1 person

      2. Muslims “refuse to assimilate” even at home. Look up the requirements for Kuwaiti citizenship sometime (and they are some of the most Westernized non-Israelis in the whole M. E. as far as I know). Basically, you ONLY have the Rights & Priv of their citizenship if your paternal line traces to someone who Accepted Citizenship in 19-forty-something when the modern nation was founded. You might be the heir of an unbroken line of Bedouin princes who lived there since The Profit (D.H.T.H.*) brought Islam, but if your Bedouin (from the word for “homeless”) forefathers did not receive Kuwaiti Citizenship when it was offered, insha-ack-ack-ack, you are what the Americans call S.O.L. on that point.

        * to consign the male subject to an infernal eternity, iykwim.

        Liked by 1 person

  9. We imported a hodgepodge of various tribes, and a whole bunch of fleeing misfits. Then, the environment and locals tried very, very hard to kill off the newcomers.

    For about 300 years.

    What we wound up doing is dissolving most of the “kinship”/”low-trust” tribal thinking, and replace it with a mutant cultural/high-trust super tribalism that paradoxically tolerates a very great deal of individualism.

    Note that Marxism tries to copy this, badly, by removing al the functional bits and replacing it with “super-duper!!TM!” and a large measure of “are you (HONK!)ing insane?!?” (Bizzarro say, “Hey, not me do dumb that bad!”)

    The problem for the Donks,and it is becoming obvious, is there was an inadvertent virus created somewhere along the way, call it SPIRIT-76. It is super-infectious, and despite maintaining its core functions for centuries, it mutates rapidly around opposition.

    All those folks the Leftroids imported to try to swamp the canoe? Getting infected, and many are getting converted. They will find ways to game the system to stick around. The kids that stay, legal or otherwise, will go native like most kids here.

    That actually doesnt work out well for Donks. lol

    Now, we just need something like “Scouting” but aimed at 20-somethings, and the kids who will someday be 20-something. “Legion America” hmmmm…. hmmmm….

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Tom Kratman talked about “amoral familism” which is another form of (or another term for) tribalism.

    He considered it the reason that Arab Militaries weren’t that good.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. “It is not rare or even noteworthy for me to find myself some public place and see a family that’s clearly an amalgam of several different points-of-origin. “

    A younger version of me used to say some of humanity’s purpose in life was to seek out the ineffable and try to eff it anyway. Also, that we’re in that weird middle time where people are both too different in looks and not different enough. Too different, because interbreeding makes everyone brownish tan. And not different enough because once we get a teeny little bit of control of the DNA, things are going to go all Wild West with the phenotypes.

    “If I didn’t have descendants, and if I didn’t come from an exceptionally long-lived line, I’d just smirk, sit back and buy marshmallows to roast on the fires of the dying civilization as we head back to tribalism for the long count.”

    See, that’s almost me. No descendants (unmarried, unlikely to have kids because of that), My line is either long lived or critically short depending, and I despise tribalism like most of you wouldn’t even believe. Fvck tribalism with a rusty metal pinecone, spikey bits down.

    “I mean, they don’t abandon kids at mini golf courses, and if they did the kid would die rather than live on bugs and feature water.”

    Speak for yourself. Little me would have done that as a kid, and thought it’d be a bloody GREAT time for about six months or so until it got too cold. But then, my jokes of feral childhood aside, I was a bit on the crazy side back then.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. ”…an amalgam of several different points-of-origin…”

      I figure the Caucasian-Asian couples I see are just Hom.Sap.’s way of reconnecting some of those Neanderthal genes Europeans have more of with the “Denisovan Girls Are Hot” genes that Asians have more of, to better mix the “might survive something unexpected” pot.

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  12. When you stuff a pattern-based, analogical intelligence into a body defended by instinct, strange things happen to the body/mind connection.

    Tribalism is a universal emergent property of human society. It is not fundamental. That’s our way out.

    The fundamental, once we pry it open with a crowbar, is “me v not-me (but for analogically expanded values of “me,” as bodily defended by personal instinct: MY family, MY job, MY car, MY politics…).”

    Which, when played simultaneously by everyone on the planet, all the time, over time, results in emergent “tribalism.”

    But it’s also why no two people draw the “us/them” line in exactly the same place.

    Totalitarianism ALWAYS fails because the life-energy DOESN’T flow top-down. That’s a pernicious illusion caused by individuals so easily identifying with (and therefore personally instinctively defending) large-scale societal patterns: MY country, MY tribe, MY government, etc.

    The life-energy is generated by personal instinct, and it flows bottom-up to power society.

    The STEERING is top-down, yes, but only so long as your propaganda machine can stay ahead in the arms race…

    “Instinct inspires self-preservation, but humanity’s self-sense is infinitely expandable” is my best single-sentence summation so far.

    The hidden silver lining? EVERY human decision, no matter how profound or trivial, is “best-available (given the shape of the expanded self-sense + where in it you happen to be standing at the time of decision),” because the logic of instinct compels it.

    Never mind cognitive dissonance, I’m saving that for later, but it fits the dynamic.

    And that means, THAT means, the self-interest handle is right there for the steering in each and every human interaction ,IF you can figure out how to navigate that person’s particular idiosyncratic identity constellation to reach a common understanding.

    Which means we don’t just win, we win-win, by playing long games with individual human universality.

    (ok, longpost, I will stop now, pet subject)

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  13. Shorter:

    The ONLY driver is instinctive self-interest!
    It’s the shape of the self that expands, changes, self-contradicts, and overlaps.

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    1. Shorter ME, not shorter Sarah,, because the longer version of this comment may have tripped the filter…

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  14. “Shouldn’t we think of others, of the family, of the people we love first?” Probably only once you start discussing morality. If you go by Heinlein’s reasoning in his Address to Annapolis, the answer to that question is a “Yes”. It was not tailored to talking about individual rights and freedoms. This works for groups, and his speech was tailored to talking about the group, and levels of morality based on the span of the group. But his groups moved beyond just family, clan, or tribe. They ratcheted up to nations, and to our entire species. He wasn’t promoting tribalism, he was promoting a humanism point of view (and service as the highest form of morality.)

    Funny, but businesses still administer tests to applicants. It’s just they give hypothetical questions, or disguise that as their 30, 60, 90 day trial period and evaluation. Me? Give me a computer and tell me that it has 3 bugs I need to identify and fix to make it work; or a broken program that I need to find the bugs and fix them, and I’d be happy as a hog in slops to do those “tests”.

    Let me tell you, after spending 22 years in the military around the world, it sometimes gets depressingly boring seeing nothing but vanilla here in New Hampshire. It’s a treat to see and interact with people who “aren’t from around here”, but are still conservative Americans.

    No more for now. I have to round up Pippi and take her to the vet for her yearly and shots.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. *Blink*

        Right of Return or Exchange? I sometimes wanted that with my teen daughter. She’s a nice adult now.

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        1. LOL. I meant at his job. LOL. He’s coming for dinner with us today. I’m going to tell him you said that.
          Six months were not enough. When I wanted to exchange him he was 13. Oh, dear Lord. THIRTEEN.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I swear the good Lord sets up the teen years so that when it is time for them to start adulting, those that raised them are willing to let them go.

            I have had the 6 months trial period to start at all my jobs. Difference with son’s two jobs is the trial period was through temp agencies. No letting go required just “don’t need this employee anymore” or hired on.

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              1. “Sis, that is a beautiful baby you have there. Now think a bit. Someday, when she is thirteen, and she is going top be -your- kid, remember well and call Mom and apologize.”

                Happily, my niece at 13 turned out to be much more level headed than my sister was. Oh dear merciful…. So very much.

                Miss ya sis. The Kid turned out OK. See you in a bit.

                Liked by 1 person

    2. Huh. Yeah, every professional job I’ve ever had required a test. Even the university job, I had to take a test before I got hired, and almost everybody else did, too. Current job, for a technology manufacturing company, we also do it.

      I had to take a spelling and grammar test when I applied to be a copy editor and proofreader in the university relations/recruitment/communications department, and I won out on my perfect spelling.

      Mostly it’s been writing jobs since, so the tests generally consist of a prompt or a rudimentary creative brief that closely mimics a real one that we might use, and the applicants have to show that they can turn the source info into compelling copy for an email, a social post, and a landing page, for instance — and, if selected for an interview, sustain an intelligent discussion on why and how they wrote it the way they did.

      I’m guessing it’s government and places where contracts are directly government-controlled that tests have been truly verboten.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. LOL!

        My interview for my current gig was CIO: “Lighting took out the site. The CEO will be here soon. We need to get the site back up and running, including rebuilding the domain controller and file server. Here is a boxed new server, and some parts we need to add. …. Do you have any tools?”

        Swiss Knife “Champion” for the win! (Thank you again Major Crummey for advising me to buy that item. Just so many cool ‘saved by’ stories….”) (Now prefer the ‘even more’ SwissChamp) Got the job, got paid for the day we spend working my interview.

        Uncorking the Brigade Commander’s birthday wine in the middle of nowhere at Ft Irwin was another good one. (grin)

        I do have a long-running rep for insane rabbit-hat-pulls. (grin)

        Liked by 1 person

  15. We always did have conflicts between newcomers and established residents. Compared to, e.g., the anti-Catholic agitation of the 19th and early 20th centuries (the 1920s Ku Klux Klan was far more anti-Catholic than anti-black—look it up if you don’t believe me) what we have now is nothin’ much, and would be no problem at al if “affirmative action” hadn’t morphed into an unkillable Frankenstein’s monster.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Nod.

      Besides being anti-Catholic, there was a fear that those Eastern-European types would “destroy America”. (Admittedly, some of those Eastern-European types were Catholic and/or Orthodox.)

      Of course, most of those fears didn’t come about as “those people” assimilated into America.

      What’s terrible, most of those “Anti-Assimilation” Lefties openly talked about “destroying White America”.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. My grandfather faced off a couple-three local Southern Illinois white-hood-enthusiasts who objected to him wooing a Catholic girl, but they all suddenly remembered urgent appointments elsewhere when his double barrel came out from behind his back.

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    1. The last time there were a lot of immigration cut-backs and complaints about “who will harvest our tomatoes,” breeders came up with machine-harvestable tomatoes. (NOTE: I’m not saying this was good, just that it happened. I am currently loading up on farmers’ market tomatoes as fast as I can blanch and freeze them.)

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    2. OK, now take that chassis, put an AI in it, and then tell me your kids will have enough stable careers in the trades to raise a family.

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      1. I doubt those will be able to correctly lay bricks and blocks within 20 years. Working with mortar and bricks is half art, which means the variables are too great for even AI to convert into motion at the moment. And mortar that is good for troweling is not good for extrusion, so that option is off the table.

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  18. These old liberals want equality for every color and creed. Then they get upset when the biological reality of different colors having different levels of tribalism ensues. They thought DNA was skin-deep instead of fundamental enough to produce different bones and brains. Not only are you ignorant of the last 50 years of science, you’re more ignorant than a superstitious racist from centuries ago.

    Your egalitarianism is the cause of the tribalism you hate. You did this. We could forgive you if you did it to yourself, but you senile classical liberals did this to America’s posterity.

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    1. Hi stupid idiot or Feeb. No. I am not ignorant. The “science” you proclaim is bullshit.
      yes, we are different, but the difference isn’t inherent in skin color. hell, most of the “american blacks” are WHITE to anyone else in the world.
      If you were correct, America as is would be impossible. Calling me a liberal and egalitarian means your reading comprehension is less than your IQ and that’s at best room temperature.
      Go away. Adults are talking.

      Liked by 5 people

      1. Asians do well, so they’re white. Hispanics, who are Caucasian, don’t do well (sometimes) so they are a different one (ask them – they’re la raza). Indians from India do well, even when they Pantone out darker than unsuccessful folks, so they will undoubtedly be white next – of course they are actually Caucasian too. Dark skinned Caucasian privilege.

        White, like, fascistii, gets stripped of any prior meaning and becomes “something I don’t like.”

        Liked by 2 people

          2. I keep on being tempted to ask image generation AI for Jain WWI infantrymen from the American 45th Infantry division.

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          3. That’s a simplification, but essentially correct from what I’ve read. The original high-level Indus Valley civilization, whose inhabitants were very dark-skinned, went into decline in the ~1800BC timeframe, at the same time as the Indo-Aryan migration reached India; the Indo-Aryans were a warlike people who’d just invented the war chariot, so I suspect there’s a connection. Again from what I’ve read the original population was suppressed and relegated to “untouchable” status, while the invaders became what is now the dominant population. So, while “Indian” refers to both, the dominant population is indeed Aryan.

            Liked by 1 person

        2. Amusingly, darker Indians were “white” in the 90s, because they came over, integrated, and tend towards the GOP.

          While the high caste college gal with acceptable views doing the right genuflections is “diverse.”

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      2. I was telling my beloved that the photo of a “black,” female judge (who had just giving a laughably light sentence to a black defendant), showed she has a lot of crackers in her genetic woodpile.

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        1. Remember the mayor of Los Angeles being on a junket to some African nation? Before reading the article, I just saw the picture and wondered why some white chick was at this African gathering.

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          1. Ghana.

            Why was Karen Bass in Ghana?

            Bass was in Ghana as part of a delegation to celebrate the inauguration of Ghana President John Mahama, and to meet the country’s first female vice president, Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang. 

            The other three were the U.S. Ambassador, the outgoing OMB Director (Ghana is totes an OMB thing, donchaknow), and a USAID female (totes not CIA) since let go who landed at the Carnegie Endowment.

            Liked by 2 people

      2. Ooh.

        An explanation for K. Jackass Brown.

        An ignorant and cargo cult wordcel could tend to be of the view that Biology, Chemistry, etc., are just matters of opinion and ceremonial authority.

        So if one needs a biology degree to understand if there are biological sexes that we can approximate as law, then one may think that the field and the expert conclusions are very fluid, and are caused by an arbitrary selection of people to be experts.

        So my model of the early work on race as biological destiny, is that it was a combination of errors. Some was methodological issues, for techniques that we did not know enough about at the time to legitimately understand that the choices were stupid and invalid. Some was outright assuming their conclusions for political reasons.

        Modern anti-racists are a bit more comprehensible if they seriously fear that academic consensus could wish arbitrary claims about biology into being reality.

        I guess the basic underpinnings of modeling, measurement, and estimation in this area are complicated enough to be an intelligence test. People who fail that test, don’t get why the likes of you, or me, or Sarah say “Wait, wait, wait. How do we know that? In absence of a really compelling case for rejecting ‘race does not matter’, I am gonna default to saying ‘bullshit’ when people bring this up.” Some of the people who fail the test think that it is vitally important to be doing a lot of ceremonies to keep race from mattering. Some of the people who fail the test think they have an easy route to proving that race matters, and go around bringing weak bodies of evidence forward.

        Liked by 1 person

    4. Assuming you’re White, you’ve just disproved your thesis. Genetics doesn’t say what you want it to say. You can group humans by DNA into any number of groups from one to however many people there are on the planet. None of those groups correlate with traditional ideas of race. There’s so much genetic diversity in Africa that two random Africans are more likely to be more closely related to a random European than to each other.

      Liked by 3 people

    6. Biological reality of different colors having different levels of tribalism? DNA making different brains? Dude, your stupid is showing.

      One, tribalism is a CULTURAL PHENOMENON. Culture is learned. It is not inherent to DNA, skin color, birthplace, or any such thing. Culture is a learned thing. Infants have no culture, they are human sponges that soak up every little bit of information they can, especially language and culture. There is no inherent culture. None. Zip. Nada.

      You, yourself are ignorant of many things. You are incorrect in asserting that OP is ignorant of the last 50 years of science. The last 50 years of science also have quite a few glaring little problems, not least of which is reproducibility for some “sciences.” Calling a science fiction author “ignorant of the last 50 years of science” is laughable on its face. Yes, we are laughing at you. Because you are amusing.

      Egalitarianism is not the cause of tribalism. Egalitarianism came long, long, a really, really, LONG FREAKING TIME after tribalism. It is not the cause. We fought our way out of tribalism for good damned reason. Tribalism sucks. It is a myopic way of looking at the world. Often brutal, bloody, and extremely repressive of any innovation.

      If you can possibly claim to be a student of science, try using the scientific method. Gather data, which you have obviously failed to do thus far. Read the freaking blog. Then form a hypothesis. Test it to see if it has merit. If it does not, discard it.

      You have come in here with the hypothesis first and no data at all on your target. Skim and attack is a common tactic of a certain class of folks. I leave it to you to look that one up.

      Liked by 3 people

  19. Tribalism worked for hominids for a million years more or less. It’s amazing we’ve kicked that habit to any extent after only a few thousand of agriculture and civilization.

    On testing-based vs. credentialist hiring’ the Fedgov is changing – a law passed in 2024 titled “CHANCE TO COMPETE ACT OF 2024” pushes the civil service to testing, and one of the first EOs DJT signed after The Great Restoration required plans for implementing that. And another Executive Order, EO 14281, is aimed at changing how EEOC goes after private companies for “disparate impact” on use of pre-hire testing, though the EEOC web site still has stuff based on the old “gotcha” rules.

    So depending on how the deep state wars go, there’s some hope for more merit and less credentialistness.

    Liked by 1 person

  20. Trying to think through why it is gaining traction, and how to mitigate it.

    I think one problem is out group preference has been used as a Positional Good by the elites. By loudly professing ever greater preference for people not like them, and then shifting those costs onto everyone else, elites gain power and status. And defended it by saying ‘of course tribalism is bad, and everyone knows it. See, history!’

    I think, ultimately, we are going to have to build, or resurrect, the argument from locally testable first principles. Because the other problem is that every institution is either deeply corrupted or suspect. No appeal to authority will have any weight. The only thing I can see working are things people can test, individually, on their own, without having to rely on someone else being truthful.

    Beyond that, I’m not sure what else to do. You say they haven’t grown up being hit in the head, but Out Group Preference has been used as a club to beat anyone who showed the slightest bit of promise to even jiggle the apple cart. It has not just been ‘ability to tan’ but every sort of mental disorder, physical problem or sexual deviance have been elevated as the Ideals of Humanity and all such. And a lot of people have been seriously harmed by the posturing.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. The Rooskies have plenty of reasons to be trying to stir the pot, and being good at this would possibly keep that guy from being sent to the front as a mobik. Arabs seem otherwise occupied, and not as incentivized these days. Iranians, though – day job’s cyber tools have been stopping a lot more activity traceable to the Islamic Republic of Iran lately, so my money would be on the Persians.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Reminds me…

            An Iranian official apparently just announced new water rules due to a drought that they’re having in the country.

            Netanyahu responded by talking briefly about the methods that the Israelis have used to make the most of their water situation. And then he stated that since Israelis are not allowed in the country of Iran, his government would set up a publicly available Farsi-language website that discussed all of these methods so that Iranian citizens could attempt to implement them on their own.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. Iran is one calamity away from an extinction level event.

              One major dam provides most of the drinking water for the whole country. They are in a millennial drought. The usual islamo-corruption has wrecked nearly all their water projects. And Persians are some of the better “get things done” as Islamic societies go. (definitely not Arab.) So that is saying much.

              Israel isn’t stupid. They can extinguish the Iranian regime, and millions of civilians, with one flight of strike aircraft equipped with depth charges. Done right, it could be attributed to local terrorists or revolutionaries.

              But Israel isn’t the bloodthirsty monster Iran claims.

              Or Iran wouldn’t exist.

              And note, folks, if that dam fails, there is -no- way anyone on earth can get enough water there to prevent -millions- of deaths.

              Liked by 1 person

      2. Also things are coming to a head to a degree where the pushback against progs is global.

        Which would be great. Except that even an English right winger is still a collectivist scumbag by American standards.

        Which is a problem when everyone is cross-pollinating off each other.

        Liked by 2 people

      3. Lots of folks want America weak. We have power. A powerful economy, military, a powerful culture that they’ve gone to great lengths to neuter, and history. If the question is “Are the Pinelandians, Krasnovians, and Greebles trying to affect us?” the answer is indubitably yes. But a lot of those attempts are poorly planned and enacted. They also misunderstand us. Greatly.

        That’s a culture thing. Just as most of our culture struggle to understand the meanings and motivations of tribals, barbarians, and other blue/orange cultures, so do they often fail to understand us. We put out a statement that makes us look a little bad, so of course we must be a thousand times worse. Because that’s just normal. That’s what they do, so we must be of the same sort, right?

        Most folks born and raised here don’t get just how different different cultures can be. On my more cynical days I can’t but think that is a good thing.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. I’m of two minds on the subject.
      On the one hand, tribalism is evil.

      On the other, unilateral disarmament is stupid.

      When tribalism is employed as a cudgel against an outgroup, it will create solidarity within that outgroup. Which can easily become toxic tribalism.

      Like

      1. On the other, unilateral disarmament is stupid.

        I’d love for you to explain how that logic is supposed to work.

        You don’t defeat something by embracing it. In fact we just got done with a century of people trying to defeat Socialism by being more Socialist. Everyone who’s brains aren’t flowing out their ears should be able to recognize this as a ridiculous plan, and yet here we are.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. >You don’t defeat something by embracing it

          Controlled burns. Vaccines.

          Assimilation supplants tribal identity with a broader one.

          To forget or deny this allows for the reverse, (re)balkanization into tribes.

          Like

            1. I didn’t think you, or Ian were arguing that. Trying to be charitable to Luke’s argument above, I could see ‘unilateral disarmament’ mean forgetting that tribalism exists, and that acculturation is important.

              Don’t know if Luke meant that rather than something more objectionable.

              Liked by 1 person

  21. I seem not to have run into this particular trend, at least not explicitly, but I have been watching that situation with the beat-down wherever it was.

    So I was doing an adaptive gardening presentation at the farmers market on Tuesday, and looked up to see a black couple walking toward me. And for the first time in my life I found myself scared at being approached by a black man. It was totally bizarre.

    I made sure to engage them and we had a good conversation, but why that level of fear? It made no sense, until I realized afterward that I’m still emotionally in that social media induced “They want us dead” headspace.

    Which makes me wonder why this particular event went viral. Stuff like this happens all the time, why this one? Why now?

    Liked by 1 person

  22. “Shake the magic eight ball of shards of pottery and bits of bone, and ask again.”

    Best pithy explanation of sociology/archeology ever!

    Much thanx, Mrs. H. !

    Liked by 2 people

  23. Tribalism, codified and set in stone becomes binding. You can’t innovate, you can’t have private property, you can’t improve yourself because you belong to the tribe/the family/the group.

    Which is why the Christian philosophy of “Christ-like love” (Caritas) is such an excellent hack– the obligation exists, but it’s internally enforced. The claims-of-family-and-neighbor-debt are internally enforced, while the codified rules can be set to enable the society at large to function.

    Like

    1. Christianity is full of great hacks like that. Proportionate justice prevents blood feuds, tithing answers “When have you given enough?” (cf. the indelible sin of racism), not bragging about prayer avoids piety spirals, the parable of the talents encourages hard work and investment, the afterlife pushes out time horizons past death (observation stolen from ESR way back), and the New Testament even has some observations on the purpose and limits of ritual.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Yep.

        Back when he was just one of the geeks in our group, my husband argued (very persuasively) that a Christian behaving culture was the best option for general survival thus far found.

        He was agnostic at the time.

        Liked by 3 people

            1. Years ago some guy commenting on the WSJ’s Best of the Web column, which had developed an actual community of regular commenter, smugly proclaimed he took his family to church because of the social benefits and good, caring community….but of course he didn’t believe a word of the “nonsense,” they believed. He was simply taking advantage of the. Funny how it never occurred to him they were so “nice” because of the “nonsense” they believed.

              Liked by 1 person

  24. When I was in the Navy we had several Sailors from Saudi Arabian and Iran, Ya it was that long ago. One happened to be a Saudi Chief, E-7, he got the job because he did well in the Olympics, go figure. He happened to be black. He told me of how when he first arrived in the states he was walking down the street in New Orleans and another Black guy walked up to him and called him brother, he was offended. Which showed the Tribalism of them both. But he had no problem eating meals with the other Mideastern Sailors for dinner, mostly Iranians. (Yes with their hands, don’t get me started on the goats eyes in the rice) But even then he didn’t really trust them, it was more culture than anything else. But culture didn’t extend to the person who looked like him, culture was the people who sounded like him.

    Like

  25. The Japanese are not “a tribe.” They are a bunch of clans and tribes, and several different cultures, glued together under an emperor. They don’t really speak the same language, at home, in many cases.

    There is a sort of social surface or pretense that is safe for work and school, but a ton of this stuff is lurking right under the surface.

    Like the folks on YT who speak beautiful English and Japanese and teach Kyoto customs and dialect, but really they are from three different neighboring provinces that don’t use the same grammar or vocabulary as either modern Tokyo Japanese, or the Kyoto dialect. And they were only a little mutually intelligible to each other, when talking like at home.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. This is a wide-spread issue throughout much of the world. The bigger a nation, the more difficult it is to merge the disparate parts together so that the citizens think of themselves as citizens of the overall nation instead of just their local region or clan. The easiest way to bring that about is by providing an external threat. For example (using a country I frequently talk about), post-Imperial China didn’t really start to come together as a nation until the war with Japan.

      The KMT under Chiang Kai-Shek *might* have been able to hold it together after the war ended, and forge a united country. Maybe. But Maoism at its core is basically “humiliate everyone else to save your own skin” on steroids, and that kind of culture doesn’t really lead to a unified national citizenry. So while I don’t know the details of what China is like these days, I’m confident that it’s not as unified as it presents itself to the world.

      Like

  26. Devon Eriksen had a tweet recently where he reasoned through the problems with using race as a selection criterion, latched onto tribe as a more precise alternative, and got as far as defining an American tribe based on shared American values…without realizing that he had circled back around to a proposition nation. He’s a very sharp observer; this seems to be a blind spot.

    I wish more people realized that you don’t need to embrace racism or tribalism to justify sound immigration policy. Three axioms get you most of the way there: “We shouldn’t import large numbers of people from countries that don’t share our values”, “Immigrants should be expected to assimilate”, and “Immigration shouldn’t unduly burden the host country”. Not racial, not radical, and you can have a healthy public debate over the specifics, like whether a small Ohio town can reasonably assimilate a few thousand Haitian immigrants.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. Most of us spent some time on the left, and the left has convinced itself of the totemic power of the model they have of their enemy, and of their enemy’s fetishes.

      Someone who had left Christianity, and who had been raised in a sect that was really insistent that pagan Headhunters were frequent, and that the shrunken head fetishes had magical powers, might carry that confidence with them on their journey away from Christianity.

      I took a lot of steps pretty quickly, and early ish in life, away from the left. I still find myself thinking in incorrect ways. (And, by that I mean mathematically invalid, or etc, not the test of acceptably correct politically speaking.)

      Left, Democrats, and communists have had some fairly wide cultural influence in our society.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. I think part of the problem is non-Left people are trying to use Left terms, because that’s what we hear so often, and it seems to be an easy shorthand. Which means you already have one foot in the Kafkatrap. So it is a blind spot in some ways, and in others it is the fish-in-water problem. Especially since the Left has pounded so hard and so long on the idea that immigrant = brown, or “Global South,” and that slips into the default assumption. Or the default challenge, so long as “racist” had any verbal or moral power. I think that day has almost passed.

      Like

  28. “there are places like small town New England where if you haven’t lived there three generations you’re foreigners.”

    ——-

    When I moved to New Hampshire in the ’80s I was so pleased to be part of the “Live Free or Die, small government is the best government zeitgeist there. I will never forget my convo w our neighbor, an old lady (think Daughters of the American Revolution) whose fam was prob in the state since Washington crossed the Delaware) where one day I shared w her how pleased I was to be living in NH, and while I could not claim the honor of being born there I was pleased that my children could claim ownership of being natives.

    Well, she didn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time and then said “Jut because the cat has kittens in the oven, don’t mean you call them muffins” and then continued on her way home.

    Like

    1. I’m familiar with that one, yes. My parents were from down South and NY-ish, moved to CT, where all of us children were born… even in my hometown, I was considered a foreigner and “not from around here”.

      Like

    2. One thing about California is most everyone here is from somewhere else. I grew up here, but my folks arrived in the very late 1950s, Beloved Spouse’s folks got here in the late 1940s, and we are among the small subset of the folks I meet day to day who were born here. I’ve met a few whose great-greats were Spanish colonial oppressors (heh – think “trying to make something from basically dirt with mostly hand labor, and not very many hands”) but they are very rare.

      So the ”not from here” set is basically everyone you meet.

      Like

      2. Exactly. While hubby, and his siblings, were born in California, his parents transplanted from the east coast for his dad’s job.

        Me? I’m related to half of Oregon, well PNW, as the extended family has spread out, a lot. Hubby says we’re always meeting “new cousins”. A smaller subset of Montana, for all that at least one set of great-grands were late comers. OTOH doesn’t take much to be related to a percentage of Montana (just not the feather Indian, that I know of).

        Liked by 1 person

  29. “a thing for Valley Forge that involves biting off the heads of gingerbread Hessian soldiers on Christmas.”

    You know, I’ve been looking for a few holiday traditions to innovate. That one sounds good!

    Like

      1. You would probably do better to just get “tin soldier” cookie cutters and then put them in “Hessian” colors with icing.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. I’m guessing the two with pigstickers are senior and junior officers, so the hat-and-great-stache guy is an NCO, then private Gunter and the poor drummer boy, whose arms have stretched out from all that drumming.

            Like

      2. They’re very expensive. I was hand cutting them with a pattern. I finally found one. The hat is different from normal soldier cookies.
        For perfect you have the kids sneak downstairs on Christmas even to bite the heads of the Hessians, then you all come down and eat them. :D

        Liked by 2 people

  30. I’ve been listening to Tommy Robinson interviews the last few days, considering all that’s been going on in the UK lately. His background is interesting, and he talks about a lot of what you just covered here in his Triggernometry interview. The more that comes out about the grooming gangs over there, the more it looks like a deliberate government program. I worry that they’re in for “interesting times” the likes of which they haven’t seen since Cromwell. And it just may take that much “interest” to clear the books and get back to being British.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Cromwellian spiciness storm clouds do seem to be gathering on the British horizon. With all the recent talk about domestic spiciness descending here, like Tom Wolfe’s “the dark night of fascism” it does appear more likely of late to touch down over there.

      One commentator I read recently predicted that if Labor does go all stompy boot as it seems they might, that’d likely just generate an Aboriginal British version of The Troubles that would run on for decades, with all those British Afghanistan veterans contributing IED tips and tricks, and with FPV drones added into the festivities.

      Lots of ugly paths looking forward.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. When you look at the last thousand years or so of European warfare, and the massacres that were typical, one sees a potential alternative to “European Caliphate” that runs towards “Abattoir”.

        “Reconquista 21” may be a thing. We might not like the net result any more than “Caliphate 21”.

        I’ll just place my bet on “Poland” as the driving agent. Kickoff? Probably soccer hooligans, so likely match gets lit in England proper. Something epic stupid.

        Liked by 2 people

  31. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » THE DISEASE, BY DEFINITION, IS NOT THE CURE:  Tribalism.

  32. There’s an old joke that explains the dangers of abandoning or ignoring “tribalism.”

    The Lone Ranger (kids, ask your grandparents) and his faithful Indian companion, Tonto are riding their horses through the Old West. They’re in a desert canyon when they find themselves ambushed by the Comanches, a feared tribe of hostile Indians. Seeing that there’s no escape, the Lone Ranger turns to his Indian friend, Tonto, and says “Well, old friend, looks like we’re done for.”

    Tonto stares back at him and says “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

    Certainly not all “tribalism” is positive. Not all tribes are “good.” But to suggest we completely abandon all such thinking and try to become One Big Happy Family – Marx and Lenin tried that. That also led to the fetishes for “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” I think the cure might be worse than the disease.

    Like

    1. No tribalism is positive. NO TRIBALISM.
      No, Marx didn’t try that. Marx and Lenin created new ersatz tribes out of “Classes” which are bullshit. It worked as well as tribalism ever works.
      NO TRIBALISM IS EVER GOOD.
      No one said shit about happy family. You’re hearing voices.
      If you want to know why tribalism sucks, do look at how Amerindians actually lived and WHY THEY WERE DEFEATED.
      If you think Marxism is the first thing to go against tribalism, you DEFINITELY have been fed lies. The first widespread effort was the Romans, that’s why they got big. If you’re calling the Romans a big happy family you are definitely a raving lunatic of an idiot. BUT they were a major step in civilization because they overcame tribalism.
      Then came Christianity. Christianity FORGED the west by abolishing tribalism.
      Tribalism is not just where you don’t consider anyone else from another group human. It’s where you don’t consider yourself human, but just a pawn of the tribe.
      MARXISM IS TRIBALISM. You don’t cure tribalism by changing the sign on it and embracing another type of slavery.
      If you’re in earnest, you’ve been lied to so much that you have no clue how life works.

      Like

    2. Marx and Lenin, AKA “let’s rob everyone outside of our tribe but have a shiny coat on it,” most assuredly did not.

      Good grief, dude, not only are you so screwed up on tribalism that you do not get a really basic joke, but to pick freaking liars who were all about the tribe of “workers”?!? Who hammered everything into a tribal form?

      :shakes head:

      The joke is because the idea of Tonto turning coat. It’s funny because it does not work, on any level. The shock and absurdity of a good man turning on a good man, and good friend, because of a stupid surface similarity to evil people trying to kill them, is ludicrous.

      Like

      1. The translated name for each native American tribe in their own language is often “The People”. Some tribes picked up European names from said Europeans contacting their neighbors first, as when the Zuni were asked the name of the next tribe over and they said they were the “Apachu”, their word for “Enemy”, thus naming the Apache.

        As to Tonto’s tribe, one of our Happy Friendly AI Overlords In Training says “Tonto is often identified as a member of the Potawatomi tribe, but in various adaptations, he has also been depicted as a Comanche or Apache.”

        If he was from one of the other tribes, it would not matter what he looked like, the Comanche would just kill him dead along with the Ranger. If he was Comanche, he’s a turncoat working for the enemy, so they’d kill him, but would possibly notify his kin.

        The joke’s likely older, but was in a 1958 issue of MAD magazine, at pretty much peak popularity for the Lone Ranger and Tonto, his loyal sidekick. MAD Magazine was all about subverting expectations. The joke is much more a self interest over loyalty dig than anything to do with tribalism.

        Liked by 1 person

  33. My theory on the nature of this uses V. Day’s (and quite a few others’) writings on the difficulties of communication across IQ divides greater than 15-20 points, and I will call these divides “cognitive bands” here. In my hypothesis, the trend originated as something like “if you don’t want to get shanked, you will do all you can to avoid X people in areas A,B and C, based solely on statistics”. If you live up in 140+ land, you can parse almost all the nuance in this sentence-meme and realize it is both true, and an observation, and, not based in race-hate. However, as memes that are rich in subtext percolate downward (I don’t have a better term, sorry!) to the next cognitive band, complexity is lost. I don’t know what the specific numerical gradations would be, and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that there is information loss each time a meme is “received” at a lower cognitive band than the one it originated from.

    This is how we end up with rhyming slogans on electronic highway signs that say “STAY ALIVE DONT DRINK AND DRIVE”. 5 words, and it rhymes – this will work on any cognitive band, I imagine…

    I had a lot of time to analyze and synthesize about memes and their propagation during the scamdemic. What can be achieved can seem a bit like magic sometimes when it comes to watching public perception of a contentious issue change in a week.

    Like

    1. V. Days has his own difficulties in communicating about IQ considering what he proudly claims (And I estimate is inflating by 10)
      Look, IQ is bullshit across cultures. I say this as someone who had both kids tested early because of school issues, and is aware of the issues of extremely high IQ out of place. Also as someone who had training in administering the tests.
      It’s bullshit across cultures. Unless you’re intimately familiar with the culture, administering an IQ test will render a result that would be better rendered as “Kumquat.” It has nothing to do with anything.
      Then there is the fact “African IQ” was mostly tested by people trying to prove they were stupid and needed ruling. (In many ways they did but for other reasons. Like our exporting Communism, which is cultural malware.)
      I’m too sleepy for this, but if you start out with “I use VD’s stuff on IQ and cultures” you are already going wrong.
      There are a million reasons it’s hard to communicate between cultures. None of them have bloody anything to do with IQ.
      In the same way the idea we only need High IQ people by whatever definition is a progressivist dream anyway.
      Cultures are far more complex than IQ to the point they act like living creatures in some ways. If our problem were IQ it would be far more easily solvable.
      BUT culture is the issue and talking IQ is a distraction.
      On top of which it has nothing to do with tribalism. Very high IQ individuals have been tribal. And very low IQ individuals have been NOT tribal. Generally it’s better to be stupid in a non tribal society. You’ll go further. And you’re less likely to starve.

      Like

      2. “Cultures are far more complex than IQ to the point they act like living creatures in some ways. If our problem were IQ it would be far more easily solvable.”

        That’s a good point that I don’t see discussed often enough. Taking IQ as gospel for the sake of argument, who would you rather deal with: a low IQ population raised on “virtue is its own reward” and “love thy neighbor”, or one raised on tribalism? Culture is enough of a confound that, even if IQ measurements are right, the prescriptions are likely to be wrong. And if you figure out culture to the point where you can factor it out (e.g., a cure for Marxism), who knows if the problems you attribute to IQ will still remain?

        Liked by 1 person

        1. who would you rather deal with: a low IQ population raised on “virtue is its own reward” and “love thy neighbor”, or one raised on tribalism?

          And we actually have a historical record of when that was MORE true, even with other issues (segregation) that had to be addressed.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. It’s so pretty— look, a nice, simple equation! Which happens to solve for X with– gosh, I am the super special leader of us all?

            And all those who oppose me are stupid and must be defeated, for their own good?

            And when we win, because it’s inevitable, THEY WILL ALL RECOGNIZE MY GLORIOUS INTELECT AND FINALLY ADMIRE MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!1!1!!111!!!

            Liked by 2 people

            2. In my case?

              I was, and maybe am, very angry at the world.

              Trying to function has been a pretty long and difficult road, and I kinda need to take joys from it where I can. Cause sometimes I look back, or look around, and the decades of work do not feel like they have born any fruit. (They have fruited, and working more will have some pay off.)

              I have found it very emotionally appealing to suppose that it is just to hurt the world, and the world deserves it, and that acting on that anger would be righteous and bring happiness to me.

              Well, no. Happiness is a choice, and anger and hate are a bit poisonous, and do not seem to have a path to genuine satisfaction and happiness.

              This is about wisdom. Which is not intellgience.

              Whether I was smarter, or stupider, having even more than my actual folly would have destroyed that much more of what I actually did accomplish.

              High intelligence can correlate to neurological issues, and neurological issues can be unusually limiting. Then a highly intelligent person can intuit that there is a difference between his real accomplishments, and what a naive estimate of potential indicates should have been possible. Then it is a question about whether she has the wisdom to catch that mistake, and pull herself from emotional self destruction. It is very tempting to attribute everything to the rest of the world, and to conclude that fixing things is merely a matter of exerting enough coercive pressure on every other human in the world.

              Liked by 1 person

          2. When practicing physics, or mathematics, or engineering, one can have mystical experiences with the mathematics, akin to some of the ones that the Ancient Greeks valued.

            These days, foundational mathematics apparently says that those sorts of hits are not supposed to be important evidence. It is still quite possible to, during tertiary or secondary school, train oneself to orient by getting those hits. Well, you get the hits by thinking about the mathematic model, and by perceiving it as true. How true the model is, and whether anyone has paid attention to how inaccurate it is, is an entirely different question.

            Even with an otherwise functional and productive engineering career, it is quite possible to be an insanely destructive technocrat in one’s personal life. Because engineers focus on machines, which are simple in comparison to human beings.

            It takes a lot of work and humility to do much of a job of becoming a generalist to a degree that one does not immediately start causing harm once one leaves one’s specialty.

            Almost nobody is a real generalist. Lots and lots of people incorrectly think themselves to be generalists, because they have not studied broadly and attentively enough to find the places where their default assumptions help them err with great confidence. (It may be possible to show that I am also merely a false generalist.)

            One of the basic problems with demonstrating that race exists, and also there is some sort of biology thing that really correlates with IQ and is more easily measured than IQ? The hypotheses are a really complicated statistical modeling problem, and it is hard to get a broad enough background in the measurement arts to rigorously know how to sort and evaluate the statistical ideas. Almost everyone with the confidence in a simple conclusion are shortcutting, and have dropped one of the stats ideas that deserves a bit more care.

            The usual statistical explanation for hypothesis testing involves a couple of Gaussian distributions, and comparing the estimated distributions to a number to reject the null hypothesis. Well, more advanced stats training introduces the idea that we are not restricted to gaussian hypotheses. To truly detect whether race A is smarter than race B, we would have to, for example, be able to settle the question of how we know which distributions to use.

            And once we enter a debate about statistical distributions, we are potentially engaging with a bunch of people who are vehemently in bitter disagreements. There are arguments that we can know which distribution ‘strongly’, and those often have a fairly limited audience that they persuade. The weaker arguments are maybe more broadly accepted. I really have not finished studying enough to have a real conversation on this with anyone, and also even if I have, I have not had a long conversation with enough statisticians to justify claims about population parameters ( 1).

            (1) Wrt to what statistical arguments people accept. And, just by framing it that way, I have immediately gotten up the backs of all the hard core non-parametric statistics advocates. (I actually do sympathesize with “Ree, we don’t know that population parameters are always valid”. I just do not remember the argumetns, nor do I understand them to the point of being able to use my own words.)

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    2. If you live up in 140+ land, you can parse almost all the nuance in this sentence-meme and realize it is both true, and an observation, and, not based in race-hate.

      IQ has nothing to do with recognizing basic rhetorical tricks and bad assumptions.

      That’s part of why formal logic is nice… and so seldom used by those making this argument.

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      1. As for living in 140+ land, it would require half of the commentariat HERE to be hit on the head really hard.
        And again, IQ has NOTHING TO DO WITH TRIBALISM. There have been geniuses who enforced and lived by tribalism. Geniuses who were Marxists (scientific tribalism.) And median IQ people who were productive and freedom-supporting.
        CULTURE influences IQ because of testing protocols which have to be culturally encoded/decoded.
        IQ does NOT influence culture, as far as I can tell. At all.

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        1. Making something seem complex is less difficult than making it seem easy. Complexification is one of the tricks politicians, j-skool grads, and other low intellect folks use to seem smarter, but the smartest people can put complex concepts together so clearly that they seem simple.

          And yeah, based on the last formal testing I did, I’d have to be thoroughly intoxicated to come out all the way down at 140.

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        2. Yeah, I do not know what my IQ is, because I do not care enough to remember or to get a retest on a good instrument.

          Measures of general intelligence, and general sorts of stuff, do measure some limits to my thinking. For example, certain sorts of attention and focus tasks have measured impaired.

          Almost all of my real challenges and limits in thinking are specific or narrow in some way. Lots and lots of skill problems.

          My IQ level would be functional enough, if I had the right supporting skills, and was not mismanaging myself so badly.

          But if, for example, I wait for the world to beat a path to my door, no amount of additional IQ would make me better at getting or holding down an job. I have absolutely made that first mistake.

          Raw IQ, in the absence of skills to apply it, can be one of the more useless things in the wrold. In my view.

          Anyway, all of the information I need to improve how I manage my life is rather narrow and specific. An abstract statistical model of the general vaguely academic task is extremely useless. I am already specialized in my skillsets. (1) My problems are more in selecting and developing skills that I do not have yet, that make my current skills more valuable.

          and like last month, I realized that I had been badly overfocused on perfecting technical skills that may be good enough, while I may have more serious and limiting issues in how I practice communication in the work place. In particular, I have an issue where I get confused about the technology, and basically forget about communicating with people at all. This would tend to fuck up most of the sorts of projects I do these days, if I have any sort of outside funding situation.

          Raw intelligence of the general sort, is a tool. And like all tools, it can be used by good men, and it can be used by evil men. The result is good or evil, heavily depending on how evil the person is. For a good person, good results are partly a skill issue, and partly a wrestling internally about what they actually do know is right. Evil oft doth evil mar, because evil mars a great many different things.

          It is like how logic is a tool, how engineering is a tool, or how reading, writing, or arithmetic are tools.

          Logic, you get out quality that at best depends on quality of assumptions.

          (1) IQ is potentially useful for a very young person, with no experience, to know. Because it helps estimate potential for some of the skillsets that are gated through academia. The military aptitude exam is probably as good, or better. Once one has enough experience attempting tasks and skills, that is a little more informative in some ways than IQ can be.

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  35. When my family moved to our current location, we were warned against choosing a nearby town. “You can live there five generations, and still be considered newcomers.” And it is/was true. Conversely, current town has had a large influx of outsiders moving in for a couple of generations. Lots of ShellOil people looking for country digs. It made our town more – – cosmopolitan.
    Nearby town? Some of the residents still speak the homelands language almost exclusively.
    But they have a booming tourist trade.

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  37. Growing up in Holland I often saw the part of tribalism that said “don’t aspire to rise above your class”. If your father and grandfather were carpenters, you should plan to be one also, or maybe a plumber — but not a lawyer or a doctor.

    The notion that “all men are created equal” is a unique American notion and one of the main reasons why America is so vastly more prosperous and successful than all the rest of the world. And it’s also one of the main reasons I’m here now, and eagerly chose to be an American citizen.

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    1. In fairness I should have added that this “don’t aspire” thing is quite common but not universal. Consider my father, who studied first chemistry and then physics at the U. Utrecht and became a mechanical engineering processor, though his father was a railroad worker (station chief, I think, or maybe conductor — not management), and his mother the daughter of a florist.

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