First I wish to apologize for this being so late. I normally don’t mention it, since a lot of you come to the blog late anyway, but today was special, and I don’t want you to think I’m ill again. I’m actually doing a lot better, compared to the last month and a half. It’s just that normally I write my blog post at night (Yesterday was late because I misscheduled or WPDE.) but yesterday I had one of the immune-desensitization shots. These make so tired, I couldn’t write a blog at night and just kind of collapsed. And this morning was the sort of day Murphy smiles on. I set the filter wrong in the coffee maker, which resulted in an entire 12 cups of coffee being distributed atop the coffee-nook table, the floor and…. the cat food under it. As you can imagine this had to be cleaned immediately. AND Indy kept trying to lap up the coffee from the floor so it was fight-cleaning. Caffeine can kill cats, but besides that I’m sure the rest of you understand the nightmare a Caffeine Enhanced Engineer cat would be, right?
Anyway– I was going to go on a rant about the possibility of aliens, but I think it is one of those posts I can’t do more than once a week, since my politics fans are somewhat concerned by my sudden and enthusiastic descent into science fiction inside baseball. So, next week.
Fortunately the close-in fan group served me up a theme on a platter by linking me on an x link. The link and the x-cancel link.
First, I would like to correct the honorable Simon Helberg. I have no idea if he’s American or Northern European, but really SPAIN IS NOT THIRD WORLD. And Spain, when it comes to work ethic, following the rules and exactness is one step up from Portugal WHICH IS ALSO NOT THIRD WORLD.
I joke, often, by saying that Portugal is at least a second and half world country. I know that third world didn’t come from that but from the spheres of influence of the US and the USSR, but people use it as a gradation, and as such, Portugal is somewhere between Spain and … Um…. Greece. Not in politics, mind, but–
What we’re measuring here is “Ability to deal with a tech society, maintain it and keep it running.” Let me assure you, ladies, gentlemen and paramecium, there are depths and depths below Portugal. And in fact Portugal is — solidly — ahead of most of South America and all of Africa.
There is reliable — if low powered — electricity. The hospitals might not be up to the US standards, but they’re a good way there to the point that is son had trained there, he could have had a successful residency here with less effort than say someone from India or China. The drinking water is potable. And people by and large try to do their jobs. It’s just how they approach their jobs that is different. And that’s cultural.
So the reason to go into this is important. I’m not beating up on my country of origin. I’m not even beating up on Spain (is still salty about large Spanish genetic contribution according to 23 and me) or on Europe in general (fun as that is.) What I’d like to do is explain why mass immigration is bad, in the sense that it degrades the US’s ability to maintain (or expand on) a tech society.
If I need to explain why this is important: Technology and the industrial revolution have lifted more people out of poverty than anything else in the history of mankind. It made us capable of living in such a way that most children survive and people don’t die of old age at forty.
So an industrial, technical, technological society is desirable.
Off the top of my head the ability to create and maintain such varies (there is a reason the future comes from America) and the qualities needed for it are (by and large, and missing some): an educated population with work ethic and pride in their labor; rule of law that applies equally to everyone; a civil culture that allows individuals to join in groups to solve a problem.
Those three combined allow for people to work and navigate the day to day without all of it being a slalom of trying to get over glitches caused by other people not following the rules or following the rules in their own way. It also allows for a certain level of innovation without the whole thing falling apart.
As you can imagine, in that index, the problems in the US have been growing. And a lot of it is through unrestrained immigration, particularly illegal “just walk over the border” immigration which immediately comes with law breaking from the get go.
Look, we already have problems of that kind, due to our spectacularly non-functional education and the last few generations being raised by (minimum wage) wolves, we don’t need to add people who are going to have real trouble adapting to the the country and who, if imported in vast undisgestible numbers will make the US as unable to cope with modernity and a tech society as the example above.
So, let me lay some things out. I get very irritated to the people who attribute the cluster f*ck that is Africa or the Americas south of the border to “race” because it’s nonsense. Africa by itself, ignore skin color, has dozens of “races”. It has the highest genetic variety in the world, after all. This means real variations, independent of skin color. And the world is full of places where the people look indistinguishable from the ones on the other side of the border, but the culture means that one side is high-functioning and the other heaven help them. Even if the high functioning is relative like the Dominican Republic versus Haiti, say. (Or Israel versus Palestine. Yes, there is shared blood, partly because of the Hamass’s rapey ways. But the living is night and day.)
It’s difficult for people who haven’t been in the scrum, in countries so small that you need a passport to swing anything larger than a week old kitten, that it is not race. Because in the US “races” (largely self-defined. You guys have no clue how much race in the US is “only another person born and raised in America can even TELL. I mean, seriously, Megan Markle being “black” is ridiculous. Send her to Africa and everyone will tell you she’s the whitest person who ever whited. And even in most of Europe she’d pass for “tanned white.”)
So, it is NOT race, but culture. And since each country has an individual and almost ineradicable culture, it is “race” if you’re willing to consider each country a race. Which people like my parents do. And it’s absurdly wrong for genetics, but dear Lord so right for results.
The good news is that this means we don’t need to engage in the repulsive business of eugenics. How well people function in technological society or how well a group of people can sustain a technological society is not going to cause us to have to start killing babies in batch lots. (I’m so sorry if this disappoints the left side of the isle. C’est domage.) But on the other hand we have almost as bad as problem, because culture is almost impossible to change at the group level. An individual can with a lot of effort and isolating him/herself from his/her native culture acculturate. It won’t ever be complete, I’d judge I have about 10% left of my original culture, but if they’re lucky what remains isn’t very important. In my case it’s mostly what I call “performative dance” i.e. the outward stuff: food taste and cooking, a certain way of moving and a basic temperament (at the level that maybe it’s genetic, maybe not) which I curb when needed. Look, it’s stuff like younger son and his wife visiting at late-dinnertime hours to pick up something, and I immediately ask if they ate and my primary priority becomes cooking for my son. There’s things you can’t even bother to fight, okay?
Anyway, as I said, in that index Spain and Portugal are not anywhere near the bottom. I actually have a ranking of countries in the index in the back of my mind, because of years growing up and listening to people complain that where they moved is “too regimented” or “a madhouse and yucky.” I can tell you for instance that Ireland is above Portugal in that index, but not unreachable levels above like, say, England or heaven forbid Germany. But Greece is below. Italy is above, I think. Etc.
What do I mean by the index? Well, of the habits of mind, for lack of a better term, that allow you to sustain civilized high tech society. The work ethic, the seriousness, the respect for the rule of law. Portuguese term for this is “organized.” And the Portuguese are actually proud of being unorganized. Though also proud of being strangely legalistic. (At the bureaucratic, annoying, petty-fogging Karen level. I figure they get it from Rome and confuse that with civilization.) No, don’t ask. Being proud of your culture regardless is big everywhere except weirdly the US, where we tend to assume we ain’t got no culture (And we’re wrong.)
If the story above appalled you…. Part of this is the personal sense of…. pundonor. That is a Spanish word, but one doesn’t exist in English that I know. Pundonor means for lack of a better term “personal face” in the sense of “honor”. Gah… How do I explain this? Obama bowing to the Emperor of Japan was a complete violation of his pundonor (if he had it.) In fact, it impugned all of America’s pundonor.
Or a more homely and perhaps more poignant personal example: When I first came to the US and before I acculturated my first job was retail at a mall. It makes perfect sense, right? I had no work history in the US and my credentials were not wholly understandable. I couldn’t really apply for jobs commensurate with my education until I had A work history. Also we were incredibly tight money wise. So shortly after we bought a house, I got a retail job at the nearby mall. HOWEVER this distressed me immensely and neither my husband nor my co-workers understood it. My family in Portugal, on the other hand, absolutely GOT it and were even more distressed than I was. You see, for me, a college graduate with an advanced degree working retail for minimum wage was a violation of my pundonor. I was lowering myself and making myself a lower class by doing that.
Now the problem is that in countries with pundonor almost everyone considers themselves the highest class even if it’s because their grandmother’s second cousin by marriage was a landowner. So getting a job, any job, is a violation of anyone’s pundonor. Which means that people try to do it with as little effort and as much “getting away with things” as they can to preserve their pundonor.
I’m only half joking when I say in Portugal the highest, unacknowledged virtue is getting away with something. If you can do the minimal of your job with a minimum of effort you are winning at life. You are smart.
This leads to a lot of shady performance and shady deals, which I think work well enough in a pre-industrial society, but … well, the circuits and wires are unforgiving, so it also leads to a lot of failure and disruption in every day life.
Um…. so to explain: When I was trying to break into publishing, my family in Portugal was very shocked that editors were judging my submission on the basis of spelling and punctuation and that this was in fact the first cut. (Only mentioned, because I had to have Dan proof everything.) After all, I was college-educated, and I was the talent, or applying to be the talent. Couldn’t I just do the words kind of closely and let someone with fewer qualifications do the donkey work of punctuating?
No, I have no idea how THAT would work, but I can guarantee it would add an hellish layer to reading submissions for magazines or anthos. And that, in fact, it would probably lead to the Portuguese system, where you get published if you’re related to someone and therefore the general quality of writing (with exceptions) is… uh…. not great. Which is why it doesn’t pay and it’s a prestige thing, and most people read foreign books in translation.
In the same imagine everyone from assembly line worker on trying to get away with something, to perserve their pundonor. That works exactly as you’d expect, and daily life is a continuous stream of little frustrations, break downs and slip ups, much as described above.
Note that Portuguese when they immigrate tend to do very very well. My opinion of this is that the ones who immigrate are already highly motivated, and when they’re freed of the demands of pundonor they can succeed with one tenth the work required to navigate the continuous daily breakdowns of life AND their own pundonor.
Of course, to do that, the ideal situation is mine: alone, with a husband in the American culture, and no one even remotely Portuguese around, except for a weekly call to mom to give her proof of life. BUT it can be done with the occasional couple and their children. It just takes longer. From observation about 3 generations, though it can be one more or one less, depending on motivation and circumstances.
If you bring a group over, they’re still bound by the exact same imperatives and assimilation and acculturation are almost imperceptible.
And if you bring a massive group…. well, they influence the host culture instead. I don’t think there’s a better example of the effects of pundonor and Latin culture than the recent “all by illegals” construction. The last house we lived in in Colorado was also our newest house, and the one with the MOST problems that had to be solved because they were a danger.
And trust me, again, neither Spain or Portugal are third world countries. For those you have to add layers like not really believing in the germ theory of disease. And various gradations of class and caste that would make your head spin. And the complexities of tribal and family obligation.
People in the third world might be not as bright — who knows? I mean, who knows if it’s genetic? you can’t judge IQ tests when the population is malnourished AND has next to no basic education in things like sitting down, reading and using a pencil — or they might be just as bright as the ones in the West. We’ll never know. Because their culture is incompatible with fully creating (or re-creating, since they’re not inventing it) an industrial civilization.
It’s not just performative dance. It’s not clothes and food and expressions. Culture is bone deep at a level you don’t even see it until you have acculturated elsewhere and look back. In fact I fully expect an angry email from my brother, if he stumbles on this post, telling me he has no pundonor. But he does. It’s just at such a gut level he DOESN’T KNOW IT. But it’s there. It’s necessary to survive in this culture. And it accidentally borks everything required for tech and law and modernity to work properly.
The leftists who crow about the conquest of the West by the “global South” are idiots who think about humans as widgets. But humans aren’t. Beyond all sorts of individual capabilities, humans get cultural software imprinted at birth (or maybe in the womb) which influences everything they do at every level.
If we really were to be conquered by the “global South” we’d go down for the long count, and have to wait for a country to reinvent modernity and colonize everyone else to teach it. At which point it would take in various degrees.
I think America is miraculous — I express this as The Future Comes From America — because people got dumped here in groups and had to learn to live with each other isolated from their native cultures. Yes, the largest group was anglo-saxon, but that was early enough that dealing with nature and the local barbarians (bah. They were. And I do realize I’m speaking of ancestors of my husband and sons. They were barbaric humans) changed them enough that they weren’t — as our founding fathers knew — quite English.
But there were others that accreted and most of them slowly or fast adapted to leaving the old world behind. And if you manage to do what, what remains is proving yourself through hard work and results. Which most of us try to.
There might be a component that humans willing to immigrate and leave all the old stuff behind, and try to change their own cultural software are already a pretty weird breed.
A combination of this created a country that can in fact create the future and hopefully take humanity to the stars.
If we go down for the long count, I don’t know when or if it will come back again.
So — for the sake of humanity, we must stop mass immigration and fix our culture so that each person’s measure is the quality of his or her work (yes, there’s more to life than work, but as any human knows, marriage and raising kids is also work. Even housekeeping) and giving good measure for their compensation.
It’s going to be very very hard, but as the close-in-fan who goes by T. G. Sunshine put it (she says it’s from and OLD Superb Owl commercial): We’re Americans. We dream with our sleeves rolled up.
Hard work never killed no one. … Lack of hard work and shoddy work on the other hand can.
So, roll up those sleeves, and let’s do it.
According To Hoyt 
Amen Sister Sarah!!!!!
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The sharing of food is so fundamentally a part establishing and maintaining human relationships. It’s more important than dancing. It may even be more important than actual speech.
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Can confirm. Multiple food allergies mean eating with other people is actively dangerous, so… yeah. It’s very hard to maintain even working relationships.
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I hear that! In Spades. I have multiple food allergies and cHemical sensitivities.
Person 1: You can’t be allergic to that!
Me: Oh joy, oh rapture! I will tell my body while my throat is closing and my bp is dropping, that it isn’t a real allergy.
Person 1: oh, you’r just being dramatic!
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I get that and I do not have anaphylactic reactions. Just my blood sugar crashing.
Me (looks at whatever goodie): “Sigh. Better not.”
Someone else: “Why? Allergic!” Makes sarcasm noises.
Me: “No. But I am not feeling the rollercoaster sugar ride today.”
Every single time, even people who should know better, except hubby and son, they’ve had to deal with the fallout, “A little bit can’t hurt!!!!!” (Wanna bet.)
Then too it doesn’t take pure sugary treats either. Was down after an apple yesterday. Yet today same type of apple, not problem.
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Nothing like coadjuvant allergies….
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I have a serious, very strange, wheat allergy. Skin contact alone gives me hives; actual ingestion or inhalation are Very Bad.
And it’s not an anaphylactic reaction, but it would kill me if I missed what was going on and didn’t take antihistamines to counter.
“Come have burgers with us! You don’t have to have a bun!”
me (who’s seen people toast their buns on the same range): Thanks, I’m good….
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A lot of people don’t seem to understand that while cooking can kill a lot of pathogens, it usually doesn’t get hot enough to disrupt the chemicals that you’re allergic to. And cooking doesn’t get hot enough to break apart prions which cause mad cow, kuru and other wasting diseases.
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ER doctors can tell horror stories about people smuggling the food they just know the other person can’t be allergic to onto the plate.
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Narrowly caught someone deliberately dropping nuts into my own food, so… yeah.
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Why would this not be a case of attempted murder by poison?
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No witnesses. Perp is now deceased of natural causes. And there are multiple reasons I don’t talk to my family.
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“Stand back, coppers! I’ve got a jar of peanut butter and I’m not afraid to use it!
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LOL. I can visualize you wearing a cowboy hat, driving a large pickup[ truck, and adopting Texas mannerisms.
( was that blatantly trolling ? )
Listen sometime to how some longtime-native Texans talk about everyone else, as if the other 49 states were only pseudo-American. (grin) Its a human thing, not “3rd world”.
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“I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could.”
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I’ve never heard of that particular concept, but it does explain a lot. “Lowering yourself” for a job and all.
I may have encountered a weak form of that back after I’d first graduated and was looking at a retail job. The interviewer said, and I vaguely quote: “We don’t like to hire college graduates because they want too much salary.”
Um. I was there. I was looking at a retail job. I even SAID under “expected compensation” that I was looking for “standard.” But this was in a college town, and job pressures were so fierce that even the TEMP agency wouldn’t hire me because I didn’t have years of experience in Office. And I guess a lot of college graduates expected higher compensation for deigning to get a retail job…
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Well to be fair the concept turns up anywhere you find survival of aristocratic class distinctions, by other names (or sometimes none at all). Case in point currently biting us in the butt, the idea that the trades are somehow an inferior career path to “white-collar” work, even though as things stand at least nine times out of ten the blue-collar workers are far more useful to the functioning of society.
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That is melting so fast it’s no even funny. And it’s …. weird, because it won’t work. Trades are going to change so fast in the next ten years.
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What makes you think that?
Trades from an outsiders view point seems to be one of the slowest moving work cultures, tradies still begin as apprentices and do a mix of on site and technical college to learn their trade just as it has for the last 50 years.
Brother Tim, I have never seen that, I was thinking maybe its not part of kiwi culture but I lived most of my life in a farming town before it became a city about 1980 and even then a significant % worked in the steel mill perhaps 20k outside of town. If they are not tradies themselves, their friends and neighbours are tradies.
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And since the 90s at the very latest it wasn’t working.
My uncle was electrocuted twice from sheer shoddy work and pencil-whipping, and the second time it was a guy who’d been on the job longer than he had.
That’s before the folks who are very noisy about how they can’t find any ‘decent’ workers, but if you know them it’s because they’ve maimed multiple, or they think pay should match what it was when they got started. (And mysteriously forget any benefits they got that wasn’t cash pay.)
Just this evening I was listening to someone bemoan how the factory they work at is objectively not abiding by the legally required safety upgrades that they already got caught for not having, which has already been set up to fix– but they are skipping paying for it.
On top a bunch of “we’re going to outsource work, and then blame the workers when they can’t provide stuff at the speed we promise based off of having all the materials instead of ordering them before we can start working.”
Another guy had all the senior technicians fired, reorganized to half the positions, and the job posted– which he found out because the recruiters pinged him for it.
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“Trades are going to change so fast in the next ten years.”
I’d love to hear more about this: living overseas and only returning to the US every so often for short visits (usually at Christmas), I don’t see the cultural shifts. Explaining why you see the trades changing over the next decade might make for a very interesting post one day.
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In the circles I moved in, a lot of the distaste for the trades seemed to be at least partly about the idea of their beloved children in dangerous situations.
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That seems to be a global phenomenon. Everyone wants what Sir Pterry called “indoor work with no heavy lifting” and the trades are not that. See for example, the Japanese Salaryman and the general respect given everywhere to teachers (who often don’t deserve it).
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I don’t see the higher respect for teachers, but I don’t make a big deal out of Day Job, either, and I don’t ask for teacher discounts and things like that. (Private school folks often don’t get “professional educator” [blargh] discounts anyway.)
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Nit: *good* teachers deserve respect, but they are rare as hen’s teeth.
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The government ‘Education!’ system actively selects against good teachers because they show how bad the rest of the system is. 😡
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Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.
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I read an interesting article about BRitain after the Romans left. The infrastructure, aqueducts, etc., worked for decades after. After a while, though, they started to break down through neglect, lack of maintenance, the usual thing. They knew how the aqueducts worked, they even knew how to fix them, what they lacked was the will to do so. THe society had lost that skill. IT’s one of the main reasons I’m not a strict libertarian. I don’t believe in magic.
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In some cases it was also a mater of “we don’t need that anymore.” If the population had relocated from administrative centers, why spend the labor and time maintaining a system there was no need for? On the mainland, you also had a population drop in the 500s (British Isles too) that led to a lack of people able to do the work of even maintaining irrigation and other systems. When they failed, the environmental damage was notable.
Other places, where people were still around, the systems and things like baths were maintained until earthquakes or other geology happened and the water stopped flowing.
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Oh no, here comes the hard right, doomy doom doomed.
XD :P
I would note, that some of this is probably not super constant over generations. Which is precisely why one slice of conservatism has a strong practical utilitarian argument. Preserving the useful mores. Which mores are useful? (It can probably be shown that there are real problems estimating this in any sort of fashion that is all of academic, objective, and mathematically rigorous.)
Anyway, ‘what does the person actually do, or what have they done’ is a bit of a necessary metric or appraisal in American culture. There’s an appropriate rephrasing of Chesterton. But, we tend to need the ability to discriminate against dangerous screw ups, because we cannot consistently discriminate on the basis of implied culture from the natural origin that we assume.
Some ‘educated’ people of the academic sort, have acquired a bad culture, and become either a danger to others, or incompatible with making machines work.
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Well targeted. I lived offshore,CH, in the ‘70s for 8-1/2 years. Did the school thing to get to the ECOLE POLYTECHNIC SUISSE. That little section of the world really emphasized to me how different cultures worked, or in some cases didn’t work. The most moving were the Eastern Block residents who were in Switzerland on sabbatical, without the family of course, couldn’t let them try for amnesty after all. Very sad to listen to the head of Solid State Physics at the University of Prague talk about how it could be like this in his country, if only…
My greatest joy was getting to go to Prague in 1993 and seeing the Czechs blowing the doors off the “ Neue DDR”. Schadenfreude is a wonderful word.
I won’t continue, but I learned a lot.
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There was a Bollywood actor who had spent time in Canada and supposedly wanted to retire there (my headcanon is that the first bout of really cold weather he encountered made all his old stunt injuries scream, and that’s why he didn’t go through with it). The public littering and pooping in his own country absolutely infuriated, and he was reputed to chase the offenders down the beach with a stick.
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I say “was” mostly because I don’t follow this sphere of media very closely anymore. So far as I can tell he is still alive, still working and living in roughly the same place, and his pr people still occasionally put out bits of fluff about him playing volleyball with the Mumbai fishermen (“see, he gets along Just Fine with lower class people on the beaches! Never mind that they have real homes and jobs and probably don’t poop on the beaches like the indigents do!”) Mostly, he just reminded me of the University of Prague chap in wsbriggs’s anecdote. “Why can’t my country be more like those countries Over There…?”
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On the other hand are the cultural Vandals and Visigoths, who come over from the subcontinent and work for a bit in tech to basically loot, but consciously never acculturate, and when they have accumulated enough said loot, they move back home and buy a compound because the wife really wants house servants.
Sure, the cities don’t smell as nice (okay, point, but this was the 90s and Silicon Valley not this century downtown SF or LA), and you have to bribe local officials to do something as simple as getting a drivers license, and the construction crews are working with the absolute bare minimum of skill and care when building the house in which your children will sleep, but hey, you have a nice large walled compound house, and a driver, and a gardener, and a cook, and several housemaids your wife gets to order around, all funded by that tech pay package.
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I’m sure the rest of you understand the nightmare a Caffeine Enhanced Engineer cat would be, right?
Lovecraft was a piker compared to you for coming up with nightmare scenarios
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The one dude’s first mistake was moving his outfit to “Red” Malaga, where “Red”=Marxist.
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The Real Academia Espanola has an etymological dictionary (or several) online.
The RAE says “pundonor” is from “punto de honor.” Which makes sense.
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The RAE definition is “the sentiment that moves a person to maintain his good reputation and to better it.”
That is in Spanish, though.
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It’s the same, it’s what you think is required to maintain your reputation that makes a difference. So, what makes words untranslatable.
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I mean, Spanish is full of words that have more implications than they have definitions.
My idea of a good reputation is probably not anywhere near the same thing that the dictionary guy was thinking. And his grandma and grandpa had even more ideas.
So yeah, I bet Portuguese honor culture is full of stuff that you are just supposed to know.
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The Reader notes that next week is Engineer’s Week. Seems we should be celebrating Caffeine Enhanced Engineer Cat.
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Argh. No.
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(en gato-neese) “It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the brew of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the tail acquires tremor, the tremor become a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.”
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I eagerly await the publication of a story about a Caffeine Enhanced Engineer Cat in a Schrodinger box.
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You are a bad, bad, in a good way, person.
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Putting an engineer cat in a quantum physicists box might be contraindicated. The quantum superpositions themselves would likely break something just getting him clos to the thing.
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“Look, it’s stuff like younger son and his wife visiting at late-dinnertime hours to pick up something, and I immediately ask if they ate and my primary priority becomes cooking for my son.”
Madam, I must inform you, that is the Jewish mother in you coming out. :)
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Cathews. The world most blessed people.
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Southern Appalachian grandmother of Scots-Irish-English ancestry ditto.
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I do believe you meant ‘class and caste’ 😛
What’s wrong with Africa (and much of South America) is no mystery — they’re continental crab buckets. Get a bit ahead, get a job even, and they are immediately besieged by family and ‘friends’ demanding “Just a little loan” which they will never get back. Actually, they’re more like continent-sized aggregations of crab buckets and the various buckets are crabby with each other, too. If one country gets a bit ahead, all the rest gang up on them.
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Nobody ever has so little that some asshole doesn’t want to take it. And the government is full of assholes.
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It is hard to overwrite “tribe survives, I survive, tribe comes first” with “Me and my family, and my other relatives can do as they will.” Europe was still tribal in some ways into the 1600s. Heck, read the history of families like the Hohenzollers, von und zu Gutenberg, or Hohenzollern. They acted as tribes in some ways, and protection of the tribe and tribal property came ahead of anything else. It was the scale that differed, and literacy, from what you see in other places today.
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That’s a big part of it, yes.
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Apparently this is often an issue for Americans who marry abroad in less well-off countries. They end up with unscrupulous relatives who come looking for “loans”.
The only time I saw a recommendation for dealing with the issue (since you don’t want to encourage a bleeding ulcer in your wallet, but also don’t want to piss off your in-laws) for American men with a foreign wife was to make the wife responsible for handling the requests. Not a guaranteed solution by any means. But if the guy has married sensibly, then she’ll be more likely to turn down “loan” requests without offending everyone than he will.
And be willing to spring for stuff like school uniforms for nieces and nephews.
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Did pre-industrial people really die of old age at 40? My impression is that average life expectancy was 40 because for every person who lived to 75 there was one who died at 5 from diphtheria or smallpox or some such. Through roughly the middle of the last century, most of the increase in life expectancy came from reducing the number of deaths caused by disease and accidents.
Consider that, according to a document dating from thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, a man’s natural lifespan is “threescore years and ten”.
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The average life expectancy was 29. And it’s hard to judge because no one was itemizing the lives of peasants, but yes. In general.
When I was a kid, in a much better society, sixty was old enough to die of old age, in the village. I saw my FIRST 80 year old at 14, and he was what I’d now expect to be 100 or more, in appearance.
Yes, I know the bs. A lot of communists were invested, for some reason, a decade or so ago into saying this is not true and people always lived about this long. I’m here to tell you that wasn’t true.
Listen to any archeologist “this person shows all signs of old age, so they were probably around 40 or 45.”
For the RICH or even moderately well to do sixties was attainable, but they’d be more wrecked than I am. Go walk an old cemetery. Remember that Shakespeare died “Old and full of years” at…. 58.
Yeah, the average age of death was lower because infants died and men dueled. BUT forty was old, with no teeth and wrecked. Their lives were more brutal than we CAN imagine.
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1632 novel by Flint. When grandma realizes the uptime school teacher is not only older, but a minimum decade older than she is. In addition, most of the uptime town residents are older. Few look older.
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have a look at old family photos, they were old by 40. The richer side of the family were old at 50. IM 63 and am in better shape than they were at 35. Hard physical labor uses one up. Bad food and lack of modern medicine does the rest. Carrying 10 or more children to term or as was the case in my family running around in the tropics hinting dacoits can’t have helped.
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This. Just ALL the illnesses in childhood.
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Stone grinding of grains leaves grit in the flour. The grit wears out even good teeth. By 40, the enamel is gone and the teeth rot. Very hard to eat properly without teeth, especially hard with -bad- teeth.
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Not only that, up until the early 20th Century the only treatment for tooth problems was to yoink the tooth out using tools we’d use to repair trucks. 😮
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And you can ask George Washington about the dental implants…..
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This.
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Even as recent as the last generation, people didn’t live as long. WPDE gave me the prompt, “What were your parents doing at your age?” to which I answered, “God only knows–literally. They were both dead.”
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Since the last generation, and really in a steady progression since about the 1950s, life expectation–the age that people figure to live to barring accident or disease–has increased due to advances made possible by tech society. My grandfather died of a heart attack at age 64, in 1954. My father had a heart attack at 67, but lived another 17 years because in 1990 they had EMTs and bypass surgery. I’m 76, and I haven’t had any heart trouble probably because I take blood pressure and cholesterol meds that weren’t around when my father was.
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Yeah, Dad had his heart attacks (#3 was the final), all of which occurred before the interventions were a) released, b)invented, or c)affordable. (Circa 1970. Stents were patented in 1972.)
Both of my brothers have had serious heart issues, with $OLDEST now 80, and $OLDER 76. I have serious AFIB (discovered too late for the usual fix to work), but so far I have all the OEM parts in my chest.
OTOH, Mom passed away at age 99. Survived cancer (caught early) and a host of other problems, generally fixed. (modulo the bad back)
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What is the fix for AFIB? Besides medication?
Newly diagnosed. Nothing offered.
Maybe a threshold? It happens. But it isn’t monthly, let alone weekly, or daily. Although it was working closer to monthly, then all the medications were started.
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Some forms of AFIB can be treated by surgery or “ablation” with laser. My wife has AFIB, and we discussed with cardiologist.
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Ablation of the relevant portion of the heart (a nerve, I think). An acquaintance I knew had it done. In his case, they ran a catheter up a vein from near the groin and zapped the portion with heat. (Hot wire, I think. I’d have to look it up.) Worked fine for him.
I probably had a mild case for some years, with symptoms that I could figure for lung issues. (Had serious asthma for a while due to a chronic sinus infection. Mild chest pain was part of the bill. Confusion of heart vs lung pain issues is part of my life. I have a steady EKG regardless, so I live with it.)
Before a second round of cataract surgery in 2012 (the first one went fine), we had a power fail (bad transformer–those don’t get replaced in the dark) and I had to sleep without the CPAP machine. Day after the new transformer, I had the second round. Anesthesia doc said “You have AFIB.” My response: “What’s AFIB?” FNP sent me to cardiologist, I went on Warfarin.
More aggressive measures weren’t mentioned. Not sure if they would have helped; I had diagnosed sleep apnea in ’98, and probably had it in 1990 or earlier. (Apnea can lead to Afib. Whee.) Stress made it worse for me, and post Afib diagnosis, I had a fair chunk of it. (Hell, beforehand, too.) Regardless, by the time I brought it up (had Medicare finally), it was definitely too late.
FWIW, the cardiologist recommends Warfarin. The fancy drugs that get/got on TV ads have a sketchy history. Warfarin has its own problems, but it works. I get my clotting time tested at least every 5 weeks, more often if I have confounding factors, but for me, it’s a fingerstick at the hospital’s anti-coagulation clinic.
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I have sleep apnea too. Been under treatment now for almost 10 years. How long I had it before treatment? IDK. Between the time hubby said “you are *snoring like your dad” (and grandfather), non-dreaming (not realized until after treatment started), and constant ache/pain in legs, was less than a year. The Fitbit sleep stats haven’t changed any, but those stats can’t track O2 levels.
Number of reasons. One to multiple bathroom breaks, plus dog needing out (try to time my wake-up calls to hers, or she wakes me up, let her out, take advantage of already being up), cats (one who demands scratches, usually just after getting back in bed because up, but not always; another who crawls under covers to cuddle next to skin which tickles), plus I’m a restless sleeper (switching sides and moving legs, etc.). The latter is the blips of wake-ups throughout the night.
(*) Very loud. The type of snoring where one looks at the house to see if it is breathing. Type that makes everyone else breath in sync. If they inhaled and didn’t exhale, you didn’t exhale either. For little sister’s wedding, I insisted on not getting a room in the hotel block for the wedding party. The other sister and BIL did. Same wing as mom and dad. Got asked by BIL “why didn’t you warn me?” (That was his wife’s job. Been a family joke now for 37 years, and counting.) If a predator was roaring outside the tent/RV, one would just figure it was dad, grandpa, or both. Both, in sync. That bad.
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I think I had apnea since 19. So much better since it’s been treated. (Also about 10 years.)
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Mine, like older son’s is a “mouth conformation issue” so it sets in early adulthood. And it’s SILENT. I don’t snore unless I’m also sick. I just stop breathing.
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My beloved has had ablation twice. it does seem to help, though he had a complication the second time that bought him four days in the hospital. His body retained too much water after the surgury and he started to go into heart failure. Caught in time, and the treatment perked him right up.
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There is no cure, but in serious cases they can do surgery, maybe a pacemaker. To treat they give you anti-coagulants (aspirin, eliquis, etc.) to prevent you from having a stroke when you have an episode. They diagnosed me when I had a serious infection although the doc admitted it was probably caused by the infection. Cardiologist gave me a wearable heart monitor. Two weeks of constant monitoring led to 700 irregular heartbeats over 600 of them lasted a single beat long, the rest just a couple of beats long. Cardiologist admitted I don’t have a problem, but gave me some free samples of Eliquis to take if I have an episode. (Eliquis is still under patent and absurdly expensive.)
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It was Eliquis that my cardiologist warned me about. He said it didn’t necessarily work as well as it should. OTOH, with Warfarin you have a balancing act between too much and too little, with high Vitamin-K foods raising hell with the clot times. I miss spinach. And chard. OTOH, both of my brothers have had heart attacks. I haven’t. Yet. :)
Bottom line, if you are willing to deal with the control needed, Warfarin does a good job. I also like that it’s cheap. Never got Medicare Part D.
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–
Trust me. I know. With insurance, cost has been running > $50/copay for 180 count (3 months, twice/day). SIL’s mother had to apply to the Eliquis company for reduced cost directly. At her income (lack of) she gets it free in the mail.
My episodes are (were?) not short. Before taking any medication, I started tracking episodes every 6 to 8 weeks, down to as often as two or three times a month. For up to 8 hours per episode (finally gave up and decided “If I drop dead, I don’t have to deal with this”). By the time I’d be seen in emergency, any episode would be over. Urgent care might have been faster, but they’d send one to ER. Tracking? Get a Kardia. Only one episode since starting Eliquis, caught on 24/7 monitor. I triggered noticing it for 4 hours, 4 hours in. The entire episode was just over 8 hours. Haven’t had an *episode in the last 6 months since the other 3 afib medications + cholesterol meds were added.
(*) Two ways noticed: Heart rate spike when it shouldn’t be (heart won’t settle down sleeping, sitting and watching TV). Can verify with Kardia. Fitbit warning, which reports “possible afib”, after the event has ended. I do not have any way to stop an episode when it triggers. I have no idea what triggers an episode.
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The only way Em seems to get an episode is if she encounters a stimulant: caffeine, obviously, but also decongestants and chocolate.
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If I’m alive, I’m in Afib. Doesn’t hurt (usually), but I have to warn the people with the stethoscopes. Between that and a low pulse rate, I raise eyebrows.
For me, the goal is to prevent the ‘fib from throwing clots. So far, so good.
Just heard from the DME people, and I get my BiPap setup on Tuesday. My centrals (AKA Clear Airway Apnea) are supposed to be fixed by it. If not, I’ll go back to the pulmonologist and either get a tweak to the BiPap or a servo type machine.
I’m using Norco* for the DME company. From the examples I’ve heard of two others, they’re better. (It’s a very low bar, alas.)
(*) Mostly Pacific NW, plus some others.
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My afib has never hurt. Super rapid heart beat that eventually I notice.
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I was diagnosed with Afib almost three years ago, and currently have episodes every few weeks for 5-8 hours. I’m on a beta blocker just to keep the heart rate down a bit (my BP is solidly in the normal range) and one of the new blood thinners. Per my cardiologist the primary risk is blood pooling in the heart and forming clots – the blood thinner makes that risk very low.
About the only effect I notice from the Afib is being tired the rest of the day. Otherwise I just ignore it pretty much, tho I do refrain from driving during an episode. (Retired so not much of a problem.) I do a Kardia EKG at intervals so I know when it finally reverts to NSR. Otherwise, eat, sleep, play solitaire and read ATH as usual. ;-)
For me it feels like more of an annoyance than a health threat so I’m not interested in pursuing ablation or other stronger measures at this time. I have had no side effects at all from the medications.
I am fortunate that our income is low enough that I qualified for an assistance program for the blood thinner – hoping to qualify again this year because otherwise I will have to investigate Canadian generics. (The US generic release is being held up by patent fights as I understand it.)
FWIW, a friend who had frequent Afib for years finally got a Watchman implanted a few months ago and he is very happy with it.
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The medication has dropped my regular heart rate 20 points …
I think it is too new, caught early, that the wait and see, is what is happening. Then too the heart valve is sounding more and more important.
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More country/genetics specific I think.
My parents generation are still mostly alive.
My grandparents mostly died in there 80’s of cancer, the exception was 70’s off something that had caused issues since ww2.
My Greatgrandparents died 60’s to 90’s Lots more heart attacks and strokes. Say between 1950 and 2000 in terms of real time.
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My parents are both deceased, Dad at 79 in 2010 of small cell lung cancer, Mom at 82 in 2012 of heart attack then stroke.
Dad’s parents, My grandma died at 72 in 1974, of a heart attack. Heart medications had just come out, but were too expensive. My grandpa died at 83 in 1985 of metastatic pancreatic cancer. I will note that I am 68, soon to be 69, but in better shape and health than them.
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Yeah. My family is one of those that confounds statistics, on dad’s side, as they lived to late eighties early nineties WITH NO OR LOUSY MEDICAL CARE.
My parents, well, dad bids fair to make 100, and mom might have made it without the accidental fall last September.
So, you know…. genetics are there. OTOH no one in the family has even half as bad autoimmune. The Little Pickle tells me that people with autoimmune live forever. We’ll see.
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I was just watching a vid (below) about a lesser known genetic bottleneck across the world in the prehistoric male population – and the male only – around 6k-8k years ago, where 95% of the extant male population failed to contribute genetic material to future generations.
While noting there are alternative explanations being proposed, the vid combines the genetic bottleneck with all the mass graves they keep finding filled with mostly hacked up males right in that time period (including one set of really very disturbing finds that seem to indicate a German cannibal village that was getting humans they brought back home to consume over a very long period from vast distances, more than 300 miles away from across Europe).
Given the dangers of hunting and combat and early farming, even with the impact of childbirth on female lifespans the male life expectancy was significantly shorter than the female in this late-stone-age to early bronze age period.
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Oh, lord – cultural differences, and subtly different ways of doing things…
Lived in suburban Athens for nearly three years, loved it, but … Greeks had so many things which took a lot of Americans for surprise. Like – driving etiquette. I saw Greek drivers do things in an automobile on the cit streets in broad daylight and cold stone sober that you’d only see demonstrated in Texas by drunks at two AM on a Saturday morning. Stop signs, stop lights … merely a mild suggestion.
Spain was an improvement, though – at least as far as driving etiquette went. The local traffic cops and the Guadia Civil were vigilant and didn’t let stuff slide. But getting other necessary stuff done – like repair to the central heat furnace in my rented house? Took a month to get it repaired, this in winter, and even though the landlord was helpful and sympathetic. Fortunately we also had a fireplace, lots of wood and lots of warm blankets. Same problem in the rented house in Utah, some years later? Fixed in a single day.
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Which is why I like Japan. There’s lots of customer service. You may pay a little more initially than in, say, France but it’s paid back by the fact that it works when delivered/installed and if it doesn’t someone comes out and fixes it for free or minimal charge.
Also, in Japan, when someone says they’ll show up next Tuesday to do the work, they show up at 8am next Tuesday, not 11am the following Monday after you’ve called them every day asking where they are and when they are coming to do what they said.
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I’ve actually got a story regarding race and culture. Probably told it before, but what the hey.
My father grew up in Raleigh, NC in the Great Drepression. I’m reasonably sure Raleigh in the ’30s was not a center of racial harmony, as a certain story about a briefcase and a snake points out. (Dad was a practical joker with a bit of a sadistic streak).
He did not turn out liberal. Oh, my, no: he thought Rush Limbaugh was, at best, a moderate. He voted for Barry Goldwater, and his opinion of LBJ was mostly unspeakable, since he did his best to shelter me from things like cussin’.
His job with the railroad involved managing a crew of laborers. OK, it’s in Virginia in the ’60s and Florida through the ’80’s, of course the laborers were all black. He was a paternalistic boss; if you did what you were told and worked hard, he would support and defend you. If you didn’t, you wound up needing a new job. One day he came home and announced he’d lost a worker.
He’d lost the guy because the young man told him he’d taken the job to build a college fund while he waited to hear from the schools. He had just gotten an acceptance letter, and was giving notice.
So what did my not terribly enlightened dad do? He shook his hand, congratulated him, wished him every success, and came home and bragged on him. Because he’d taken a low-status job and then worked hard so he could move up. Not a black thing, not a white thing: an American thing. And Dad reacted as an American.
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OK, I have a comment in WP moderation. WPDE.
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whoops, they took it out. *Sigh*.
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It is a badge of honor!
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“Look, it’s stuff like younger son and his wife visiting at late-dinnertime hours to pick up something, and I immediately ask if they ate and my primary priority becomes cooking for my son. There’s things you can’t even bother to fight, okay?”
That’s something that isn’t quite as unique, Miss Sarah. Longtime Southron persons do this with alacrity. The feeding of people, especially family, is a sacred duty that shall not be infringed upon by anyone what knows what’s good for them. It’s a tradition so deeply ingrained that every generation of women knows it deep in her bones that this is What Is Done.
“Pundonor means for lack of a better term “personal face” in the sense of “honor”.”
Honor, status, standing, dignity, a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B… It exists in the South still, but muted. I’ve worked jobs both white and blue collar for years, dug ditches and the like as well as air conditioned offices. Some of that sense of loss of standing when moving from one to the other, yes, I can recognize it. Some folks still care about it more than I think of it, my own self, still.
But, by and large, it’s of a different form. Going from teaching to fixing cars and scrubbing pots was seen as something disreputable to some of my old acquaintances. Eh. Money was better and the jobs weren’t all that hard anyhow.
“People in the third world might be not as bright — who knows? I mean, who knows if it’s genetic? you can’t judge IQ tests when the population is malnourished AND has next to no basic education in things like sitting down, reading and using a pencil — or they might be just as bright as the ones in the West. We’ll never know. Because their culture is incompatible with fully creating (or re-creating, since they’re not inventing it) an industrial civilization.”
For raw intelligence potential, they’re no different than thou and I, generally speaking. But culture, opportunity for education and quality thereof, those things matter. Yes, nutrition too, especially when young. But on the grand scale? Take an infant from a third world country and raise him up here proper like and I’d wager you’d be hard pressed to tell him from any other American once he’s settled in right as an adult. Plop an American infant in the third world, in the same situations as those that are born there, and I’d expect about the same effect.
The interrelationship between culture and basic, testable intelligence is a rather interesting one and not one well studied for obvious (RACISSS! the snakey people hiss) reasons. Fortunately for me, I’m not one to try and excuse my cultural superiority and I can tell you that yes indeed, classical American is quite superior in point of fact. We take all the best stuff from other cultures and happily graft it onto our own and we make it all the better in the process.
Of course the other cultures think they’ve got plenty to brag about over us, too, but that’s on them being wrong, not us.
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Southern culture has been different from the culture of the rest of the US, and it didn’t go away after the Civil War. I’ve read de Tocqueville and David Price’s book Love and Hate in Jamestown. DeTocqueville noted that the north had been settled by societal castoffs, but in Virginia the British tried to lure aristocrats to colonize with offers of free large plots of land. That led to high society Virginia being populated by the aristocrats that had no good place in British society and who felt they needed slaves to work the land. In other words, the spare of the heir and a spare culture. They brought their disdain for actual labor with them. Price, in his book, lays this out via the letters of John Smith who came from the lower classes and had to insist almost on point of death to get the layabouts who were half the colonizers and who thought themselves upper class to actually work.
That is where you get the attitude of a Scarlet Ohara.
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Then you get the southern Appalachian mountains, colonized by displaced poor of Scotland and Ireland after war and rebellion. How many sports were developed using the skills of smugglers? 😉
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“I’m sure the rest of you understand the nightmare a Caffeine Enhanced Engineer cat would be, right?”
Our first Christmas with our first cat, we had a live tree. My wife had been told by her mother that mixing sugar in with the water for the tree would prolong its life. One night we got home and our kitten acted like he was from some crazed Jim Carrey movie. He literally climbed my pants then my shirt up to my shoulder, wrapped himself around it, raced back to the floor and ran from one end of the room to another. Took a while for us to realize we had accidentally fermented our Christmas tree water, and the poor guy was drunk.
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I had many physical labor jobs both before and after I got my beloved History BA. One thing sometimes overlooked is how the exorbitant minimum wage laws have eroded the possibilities for teenagers to get jobs as busboys, fast food workers, box-boys in supermarkets, etc. I also did my own car repairs until I was in my mid-30’s and finally making enough money that it made sense to pay someone else to do them.
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The hypothetical services for disabled workers are also not for completely free.
The money taps bleed the business, but do not ensure that the funds and bureaucratic overhead are ever spent and ‘spent’ effectively towards the purported goal.
The minimum wage laws alone would be bad, the welfare taxes alone would be bad, but the combination with the other employment regulatory factors just prices some people here out.
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Oh yeah, America is the only place in the world that I know of where people actually brag about “hauling themselves up by their own bootstraps”. (Never let physics get in the way of a colorful phrase.) Hence, you have otherwise snooty people like Kamala Harris insisting they used to cook fries at McDonald’s.
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I think it is (or was) a British and Northern Europe thing too. Plenty of examples in the past at least.
One of the (many) things that annoys me about the current crop of UK pols is that for the most part they have not done that. The career path has been University ->low risk office job->political job->MP->cabinet minister
Back in the last century many Labour party pols had put in their time as coal miner/factory worker and no few Tory ones as farmer or company owner/manager as well as of course serving in the military for all sorts. They’d seen the world before getting into politics and it obviously helped.
The Holy St Margaret of Iron worked as a research chemist making ice cream, for example. 2Tier was a human rights lawyer then a civil servant (AG equivulent) then MP and now PM.
Tell me which one has broader experience of the world
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Kier is more nuanced than I had previously given him credit for.
It might not simply have been a matter of his professors falling him, or him getting recruited by the soviets.
His family seems to have been Labour fanatics.
He was also ‘first to go to university’.
So his faculty could have been competent enough, and he could still have walked into the practice of law unprepared to become anything other than a destructive partisan ninny.
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If America has a kind of pundonor, it is so self-starting that it’s not funny.
The Saga of Pappy Gunn. A one-man Army Air Force unit, to whom all was possible if physically possible.
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“It’s not possible because….” “Bull, we did it, and here’s the film.”
Truly amazing.
I seldom watch longer videos, but that was worth every damned minute.
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If it’s genetics, not culture… then they’re home free.
They don’t have to work hard, or be a decent human being, or even teach any offspring they spawn. They’ll be good or not inherently.
They’re free to be the “smart” guys that find the ways other people don’t notice.
…..I think everyone who grew up around criminal lowlifes just shuddered.
I know I shuddered when I read the description of ‘doing the absolute least you can get away with’, because that sounds like the “smart” users I’ve met.
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I can do a lot of “trade”-type work. Fix plumbing, do decent electrical work, put together and saw and nail lumber, etc, etc, etc.
I never wanted to work in the trades because I met enough people that worked in them that I knew they weren’t my “tribe,” if that makes sense.
(Of course, I lost what I thought was my tribe when SF fandom went more woke than a small yappy dog with a “forget the water” espresso IV. Still got the not-fun bite marks.)
But the trades are, sadly these days, very far downhill the corporate ladder. Easily replaced by illegal labor through contractors they can wash their hands of as needed. Or “connected” (union, mob, etc, etc, etc) in some way or form. And it’s all about speed and cheapest possible thing to meet code.
Frustrating. VERY frustrating.
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If they manage to meet code at all. And then it turns out the building inspector is one of them and will sign it off for just a leeetle baksheesh… ☹️
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I want to believe otherwise, but I’ve heard too many stories from tech about what happens when a shop goes Indian. Especially in a high-trust specialist industry that makes me leery about medical devices.
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Building Inspector integrity is one of those primary indicators of actual functioning civilization.
Of course, there has to be a general acceptance that the codes being enforced are actually based on safety and function, not some BS baloney written to give inspectors more work or to justify the code writing organizations existence. Break one link in that chain and things start to fall apart.
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Don’t forget providing liability exemption to the providers covered under it. “It met code” is a legal defense.
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According to my Stepdad, who worked for many years as a finish carpenter, but can also do any or all of the other trades, the reason the mexican workers are so cheap and fast is they only do about 2/3rd of the job.
I like to think that American construction workers, even if they are, say, born framers who only ever measure to the half-inch, have still internalized the Building Code of Hammurabi, and that in general, Americans build better stuff because we consider, even just subconsciously, that other people’s lives may depend on us doing our jobs right, the first time.
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The merit of expertise, which is required for the United States to function, isn’t something to be gauged by subjective standards acquired through cultural mores or something as insignificant as the color of skin. It requires a genuine personal standard of excellence, a willingness to be informed, and an ethic that doesn’t accept anything but the best of quality, regardless of the endeavor. Unfortunately, that’s not always found in other countries. Introducing large groups of people that are mostly clueless about standards that required dozens of years to fine tune only creates acceptance of lower standards, and an attitude that those standards are probably good enough. The United States wasn’t built with “half-assed” efforts, and anything but the best isn’t needed.
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A more frightening scenario with Indy and the coffee machine is that he might figure out how to use it. And then order some catnip tea to use in it.
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thanks for insta-link, btw!
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np
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Thank you for knowing how “first-second-third world” works. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Next up: time zones — most people just can’t remember how they work.
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Digging up some words today, looking for a dictionary of the inter-war American vulgar tongue, and ran across a piece of evidence for Mrs. Hoyt’s arguments here about the black / white racialism in America and, sadly, anyplace that imports AINO academics: https://www.cubaencuentro.com/cultura/articulos/la-impostura-racial-344122
Anatole Broyard “passed as white”. What’s more he didn’t want his children to be required to be Black, so he let them grow up thinking they were White so the racial crab bucket wouldn’t tear them down.
The part of the world Mrs. Hoyt’s and my family comes from have similar families to Mr. Broyard’s. And in my case, across three continents, and multiple races they’re all Lutheran. So.
Two ancillary points: the first, the Haiti and Dominican Republic might appear to be poor examples, as anyone who wants convincing of it knows the racial demographics of both.
The second is that, “No, it’s a good example.” Because the racial mixture, as well as the more functional culture of the D.R. is maintained by strict border controls to keep Haitians–and therefore their culture–out. Think about how coywolves get bred, and how, without human intervention and massive disruption of their lifecycle: they don’t.
Racism is a fake vice, with no counter-virtue, created specifically to keep the real vices alive, and to force men like Mr. Broyard to chose between family loyalty, tribalism, and an effingy identity, and to shut up anyone who was fed up with all of it. Lots of identities are neutral to positive. “Red”ness, “White”ness, “Yellow”ness, and “Black”ness isn’t one of them.
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I suspected and now know — thanks 23 and me — that I have more African genes than most “black” authors of science fiction.
So what? I’m not going to submit to “Black only” SF anthologies, because what they’re looking for is AMERICAN BLACK CULTURE and particular chip on shoulder victimology. That’s not me.
Same way husband found out recently he could claim Amerindian. Still in the degrees that count. But he was raised upper class New England. (The other is mom’s side.) And that’s what he is by temperament and culture.
Though it’s good to know the Amerindian. It explains issues with sugar, alcohol, and others.
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WDE. Like button randomly refuses to work after a bit unless I switch over to Google. Blergh.
Oh! Here’s the site: https://vintageslangdictionary.com/decades.html
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>Spain isn’t third world!
>Proceeds to describe a bunch of third world attitudes
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But it’s not. It’s outright first world, compared to say, Latin America.
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