Comments glitch

To anyone who has been unable to comment, my apologies. It was called to my attention that those who tried to post a comment here were not able to do so. I've made sure the comment settings on the blog are correct, and I hope you all can post. Please let me know (PM me at the forum or e-mail me) if you are still unable to post.

Why are so few women 'realists'?

The question came up recently in a discussion here as to why there are not more women who are 'race realists'. I think this is a valid question because I think it's true that women tend to be more liberal than men and on questions involving race, ethnicity, and other such touchy matters, women tend to be very liberal and less territorial than men.

But I think the question is really part of the larger issue of why women are more liberal in all respects than men. I speak in a general sense; women just tend to be more liberal, more softhearted, more 'feeling' in their approach, and more prone to sympathize and empathize, and to be 'inclusive' in the best liberal tradition.

Most women will readily concede this fact. Now, I recognize this isn't true of all women, and that there are exceptions. Obviously I'm not typical of women in that respect, and the women who read and post here are also atypical to some degree.

This piece from a dozen years ago discusses the 'gender gap in politics', and the voting patterns of women. I think it's still valid:

STANFORD -- The gender gap in politics, which pollsters expect to be especially large in next week's presidential election, can be attributed to a different stance between men and women toward social equality, says Felicia Pratto, a psychologist who studies political attitudes.

This difference does not consistently show up as a Republican-Democrat or liberal-conservative split, she says. Women voters in this country and elsewhere have been both more conservative and more liberal than male voters in the past, depending upon what the issues of the day were.

"When we ask people in polls to self-identify themselves as liberals or conservatives, we are saying we know what the meaning of those labels are, but I think we are deceived," Pratto says. "That's why it is useful to try to explain differences more explicitly and on a somewhat deeper level."

Gender differences or gaps in those political attitudes also can be explained largely by a tendency among men to want to enhance social hierarchy and a tendency among women to want to attenuate it.

Pratto and her UCLA-based colleague Jim Sidanius and their graduate students consistently find that men are more supportive than women of what Pratto calls "hierarchy enhancing" social policies, such as arresting the homeless for sleeping in public places or increasing military spending. Men are also more likely to endorse ideologies that state or at least imply that certain kinds of people are not as good as others ­ displaying class, ethnic, national or sexual prejudices, according to their studies.''

Interestingly, researchers who have attributed women's support of social welfare programs to self-interest have not made the same accusation about men's greater support of military and defense programs," she says.
[...]
"Self-interest doesn't explain, for example, why white women are more concerned about racial equality than white men are, and it doesn't explain why women are less opposed to immigration or gay and lesbian rights than men."
[Emphasis mine]

I have noticed this tendency of women to be more liberal on issues like racial equality and immigration, as well as on homosexuality, than men. In conversations I've noticed, too, that even women who can sound very tough and very conservative on issues like illegal immigration might, a short while later, say something very liberal on these issues. I've learned via experience that a woman might sound very conservative one moment and yet the next moment be lamenting 'racism' or 'hate', talking about how horrible we have been to minorities. I have met more than my share of women who are self-contradictory on these issues. I've learned that I have to tread very carefully with the truth when I am talking to such women. I can truly say that it's no wonder that men have tended to accuse women of being inconsistent or illogical; some women seem to waver considerably depending on the circumstances.

I know plenty of Christian women who hold very liberal positions on homosexuality, and who think that it's hateful to call homosexuality a sin. The best I can manage in trying to understand this is to say that it seems that women place a very high premium on being empathetic, and they empathize with the poor homosexuals and believe they are entitled to our compassion and understanding. Similarly with immigrants and ''others'' in general; they tend to feel sorry for the illegals and immigrants generally, and they are quick to believe all the sob stories about the travails and the persecutions of the illegals.

Some women may say something very negative about illegal immigrants, for example, and then a moment later, perhaps thinking better of what they said, will tut-tut about 'hate' towards immigrants, and say that we mustn't give in to 'hate.'

I find such a conversation a hard one to navigate. What does one say in response to that? What can we say that will not sound like a defense of ''hate'' or ''racism''? Nobody wants to defend either of those things.

I would like to find a way to get across to people that it isn't about ''hate'' but about a zeal for defending what is ours: our people, our kin, our neighbors, our homes, our way of life, our heritage. It's about loving and protecting and preserving all those things. It's about wanting the best we can provide for our own, and sometimes, like it or not, that has to come at the expense of others, others who are trying to wrest away what we are trying to hold on to. We can't all have what we want. Sometimes, it is a zero-sum game. It isn't about hate or ''racism''; it's about justice and about boundaries and about protecting and defending and preserving. Ultimately it's about love, love for those nearest to us, and about placing them in the favored position. Maybe most women don't have these protective instincts in the same way that men tend to, or perhaps women tend to want to nurture and help everybody indiscriminately. And it's true, conversely, that there are far too many effeminate men these days who are like the women in that respect. The blurring of gender roles affects all of us.

And yet there are women who think as I do, and who are more hard-line, women who ''get it.'' However I think they are rather few and far between; many women vacillate between defending their own and empathizing with the 'stranger' and the perceived underdog. But what makes some women less prone to that? Maybe I and women like me are some kind of aberration, but then I know there were many more women like me in past centuries. Plenty of colonist and settler women had to be strong, and had to even take up arms to defend the homestead if danger threatened when the menfolk were away. Had women of the past been as wimpy and as promiscuous in their empathy as many of today's women, we simply would not be here today. Women once had more of that 'territorial' instinct that is getting rarer these days among both sexes, it seems.

Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I keep looking for signs that things are turning around, and that the old 'tribalism' which enabled us to survive and prevail in the past is resurgent. We have to hope that it is.

And now, for something completely... trivial

I think we're all rather fed up, and weary of the dismal political prospects in our country, so for once I am going to blog about something rather more trivial -- or is it trivial? The subject is the role of hats in our society.

I tend to agree with that philosopher -- was it Confucius? -- who believed that every little detail of life had some significance, and that the small details and niceties and ceremonies were building blocks of civilization. I am one of those rare people who believes that clothes, in a sense, do make the man or the woman. By that I don't mean that the expensively-dressed people, or the fashion plates, are superior to the rest; far from it. But I think that not only does the way we dress and present ourselves reflect our total worldview and our attitude, but it also helps shape it.

I think most of us would agree that there is a different feeling associated with wearing our best, our Sunday finery, as opposed to wearing our sloppy, lounging-around clothes. But does the phrase 'Sunday finery' even have a meaning nowadays, when most people who attend church wear the same clothes they wear for a casual occasion or recreation? In most churches I've attended in recent years, I've seen more jeans and athletic shoes than dressy clothes, and I've seen a lot of rather revealing clothes on many women, especially the younger ones. When the subject is discussed, I'm always the lone voice speaking for dressing up; most people nowadays are very insistent that God wants them to be comfortable above all else, and that they have a God-given, Constitutional right to wear jeans and sneakers to church. Anything else is decried as being superficial or snobbish.

Again, I appeal to tradition here: generations of our ancestors believed in wearing their best on Sundays, and that did not mean being a fashion plate, nor did it mean competing to be the most stylish or the most expensively dressed. Past generations may not have had expensive clothing, and my Puritan ancestors believed in dressing rather simply and conservatively. Those who had little money and few items of clothing still wore the best they had for worship, and the clothes, no matter that they might be cheaply made or well-worn, were clean and pressed; it was a matter of showing respect.

But now it seems it's all about ourselves and what we want or what we feel most ''comfortable'' in.

People these days seem not to favor dressing up for fancy secular occasions, like going to the ballet or the opera or a concert. I remember when I was a child, we dressed up to go to the movies. My parents both loved movies and we went as a family, and dressing up was de rigueur for evening movies. Similarly for travel; you wore your good clothes to take a plane trip, or even a train trip. Nowadays, wherever you go, the Uniform is everywhere: jeans and athletic shoes. Male or female, the look is much the same. I remember being bemused and somewhat appalled about 15 or so years ago when John Kennedy Jr. was photographed by paparazzi with his then-girlfriend, and both he and the girlfriend were dressed identically, with jeans, sneakers, and identical bomber jackets and baseball caps. Unisex. I thought they both looked very proletarian and sloppy, these 'beautiful people.' What's the use of being rich and beautiful and young if you dress in frumpy, nondescript, shapeless, genderless clothes?

One of the items of clothing that was once standard though now rarely worn is the hat. This is true of men particularly; when I was a child hats were almost universally worn by men. And there was an etiquette involved in hat-wearing; the hat had to be doffed in certain settings (in the presence of ladies, and in church, for example). Men would tip the hat as a greeting. I remember in a building where I worked about 20 years ago, there were still a number of older men who visited there, who still wore their hats, and they unfailingly removed their hats as a chivalrous gesture when I entered the elevator. I found that rather gallant and touching, realizing that these men were a vanishing breed in our society.

Here is a rather fun article about 'Bringing Back the Hat'.

''Up until the 1950’s men were rarely seen out and about without a hat sitting upon their head. Since that time, the wearing of hats has seen a precipitous decline. No one is precisely sure why. Some say the downfall of hats occurred when JFK did not wear a hat to his inauguration, thus forever branding them as uncool. This is an urban myth, however, as Kennedy did indeed don a hat that day. Another theory posits that the shrinking size of cars made wearing a hat while driving prohibitively difficult. Most likely, the demise of hats can simply be traced to changing styles and the ongoing trend towards a more casual look.''

Yes, I think that the changing hairstyles and the overall trend towards a more proletarian, egalitarian, anti-style look explains the disappearance of hats. JFK's hatlessness might also be explained by his own hairstyle; he had a very thick, bushy head of hair that was probably not suited to wearing a hat. Later on in the 60s as young men began to adopt the Beatles hairstyle, and long, unkempt hair became the fashion among younger men, hats just didn't suit the look. Later on when some long-haired young men began to affect hats from earlier eras, for example, young hippie men wearing high silk hats with their ragtag, motley attire, the effect was clownish; similarly with long-haired young men wearing a fedora. It just looked absurd. But hair was all-important in the 60s and onward; long hair was a badge; it showed whether one was one of the 'enemy' or whether one was part of the Movement.

Women, too, abandoned hats around the same time, for similar reasons; the bouffant hairstyle, which was teased and sprayed into shape, was not well-adapted to hats. So the hats had to go; no big-haired woman wanted her hair to be flattened by a hat.

As the years went by, the counterculture look seemed to prevail, and people tended to associate the pre-counterculture fashions as being stodgy and ridiculous. Hats were square and passe.

''Yet hats are due for a full resurgence. Hats are both functional and stylish. They can cover a bad hair day, keep your head warm, and shade your eyes from the sun. They can also be worn to cover a receding hairline, which interestingly enough is why Frank Sinatra, an iconic hat wearer, start wearing one in the first place. They give you touch of class and sophistication, impart personality, and add an interesting and unique accent to your outfits. And hats are a sure-fire way to boost your confidence. A cool hat can quickly become your signature piece and give you extra swagger.

Of course men today still wear hats, but they are most often confined to ratty baseball caps, hippie beanie caps, or the thankfully almost extinct trucker hat.''

Personally I would like to see the last of those ubiquitous baseball caps, except on actual baseball players of course. They are fine in the appropriate context.

The comment thread contains a link to this piece by Theodore Dalrymple, called Use Your Head.

''Theodore Dalrymple believes that wearing proper hats — not hoods or woollen beanies — could encourage self-respect and civility in the young
[...]
Why do men behave so badly nowadays? I know that the question has been asked for more than 2,500 years, but it just so happens that, this time, it is entirely apposite. Any doctor who has worked in the NHS will tell you so.

The explanation came to me a few months ago in a blinding flash of illumination: the hat. To the hat, or rather to the lack of one, is to be traced the source of all our ill-deportment. Bare heads, or heads accoutred in the wrong kind of headgear, cause our want of self-respect, and therefore our want of respect for others. What we need, therefore, is more hats: proper ones, from cloth caps to trilbies, homburgs, bowlers and toppers.
[...]
Reflecting on hats, it suddenly occurred to me how much more difficult it was to behave badly in a proper hat, and how much easier to be polite in one. I recalled the days of my childhood during which most men wore a hat, and I remembered that my father, who was not always the most considerate of men, never failed, in a gesture of genuine politeness, to raise his hat to someone whom he knew. Indeed, the etiquette of hats was drummed into me as a child as being a stage in the taming of the natural savage.''

It's an interesting piece; I recommend reading it. Dalrymple asserts, perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that we might encourage hat-wearing as a means of increasing public civility. But I think he is somewhat serious, too, and I do think that what we wear and how we behave are not unrelated.

I think that dressing appropriately shows a proper respect for convention and tradition; dressing for ''comfort'' or to make some rebellious or defiant statement is appropriate to a more adolescent society, which we have become in recent decades. One of the distinctions between the America of my childhood and today's America is that it seemed in the past that grown-ups were in charge; there were rules, there were standards, there were traditions and conventions on which there was a solid consensus. In today's America, it seems as if we've entered Neverland, as in James Barrie's Peter Pan, where there are no grown-ups, and each child creates his own personal Neverland.


I knew someone who said he liked old movies. When I asked him what kind of old movies he liked, he said, ''anything where they wear hats and drive black cars.'' I don't know the significance of black cars here, but the wearing of hats seems to be an indicator of the days when America was still sane and our society was still civilized and decorous.

The guilt game

Over at American Renaissance, there is a discussion of the Condi Rice story -- the one I blogged about yesterday, in which she says that America has a 'birth defect'.

Among the comments on the article, there is this one:

"She is definitely a product of our culture of over-simplification.

As if ALL Whites are the same. As if all Whites are one big extended family. When Jared Taylor says we’re an extended family he is using it as a construct. We do not stick together like a Family. Actually, not even White families stick together. An obvious fact with equally obvious and devastating consequences that Whites and everyone else STILL don’t want to talk about. Even he would admit that. Of course, to anyone who has been paying attention, Whites are hands down the MOST diverse Race there is.

But that aside; we have a BIG obvious problem here. There are practically NO surviving direct descendants of Slave Owners. Nearly ALL White people today are from the big wave of immigration from the Potato famine to the turn of the century and the few million Whites who came over after that.

NONE OF US ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR SLAVERY - AT ALL! It is a LIE!
The ONLY things they have to control us are the old - OLD - standbys of Guilt and Duty. In this case, Guilt for the Past, and Duty to right the wrong.

I feel ZERO guilt. I am the descendant of Potato farmers and Factory workers. The Irish were tyrannized by the English twice as long as Blacks were slaves. I have NO resentment because resentment is unhealthy. Nothing burns one up faster than the effects of resentment. That aside, I have a right to my own life. Life for everyone is short and you only get one. I will NOT waste it playing the scapegoat.

JUST SAY NO!"

This comment encapsulates a lot of things that I find annoying in any discussion of race relations and history, including slavery. I find that the 'arguments' in the comment, frequently made as they are, leave much to be desired. In fact, the arguments only provide further fuel to the other side.

The commenter, though probably well-intentioned and 'on our side' seems to be implying, when he disclaims personal responsibility for slavery, that although he and others like him are not responsible for slavery, other whites are. This is a kind of ''everybody for himself" argument. It's facile to disclaim responsibility for oneself and maybe one's family by claiming as many do that ''my family wasn't here until after the Civil War, so I'm innocent." What does that say? That all white Americans whose families were here before the War Between the States are guilty, or potentially so? All the argument does is point the finger at other whites. Would it not be better, while also displaying solidarity with one's own brethren, to say none of us are guilty, simply because none of us were alive then? No American alive today has ever bought, sold, or owned a slave. No American alive today has ever been sold or bought as a slave. Therefore nobody owes anybody, even if we assume wrongly that we can retroactively make slavery a crime.

The commenter is making some very dubious statements when he says that

''There are practically NO surviving direct descendants of Slave Owners. Nearly ALL White people today are from the big wave of immigration from the Potato famine to the turn of the century and the few million Whites who came over after that.''

Really? Can the commenter prove these very broad assertions? I think a lot of people tend to believe these things, simply for self-serving reasons. People are so afraid of being called racist, and are so eager to disassociate themselves with slavery, that they often claim that none of their ancestors were in America during the slavery era. Now, maybe I underestimate the number of 'Ellis Island', later-wave immigrants and their progeny in America, but unless, say, all eight of your great-grandparents truly arrived after the slavery era, which I think relatively few people can say, then chances are you have some ancestors who were here during that time.

The commenter wildly claims that slave-owners have "practically NO" direct descendants in America today. I say that's just flat-out wrong. Even if we wrongly believe that only people in the South owned slaves, there are plenty of descendants of slave-owners around today, including yours truly. The fact is, even some of my New England ancestors were slave-owners, and no, it is not true that only the very wealthy could afford or keep slaves. Many people of quite modest means had maybe one or two slaves as household help. It was not just wealthy plantation-owners in the South who had slaves.

And how do I know that my Yankee ancestors owned slaves? For one thing, I have seen many of their wills, in which their possessions were listed. In many cases, slaves were mentioned specifically, by name and age.
But somehow people have assumed that because the North outlawed slavery first, and because the North went to war against the South in part because of slavery, that they never practiced slavery themselves. Obviously they did.

So, having only Yankee ancestors, or less-than-wealthy ancestors, is no guarantee of 'innocence' in the PC kangaroo court. It's been said by the reparations crowd that all whites are guilty by association anyway, even if they could produce a family history showing a lack of connection to slavery. And a further point: most white people cannot do that because many of us don't even know our family history past our grandparents. I meet a staggering number of people who have no idea of their ancestry except in very vague and general terms. Most could not tell you their great-grandparents' names.

But trying to evade culpability for slavery by claiming to be the product only of recent immigrants, or post-Civil War immigrants, is dodging the larger question: is there such a thing as generational guilt, or inherited guilt? Since when do we punish people for their ancestors' supposed sins and crimes?

Another question which occurs to me is: where is the solidarity that we should be showing among ourselves? One of the reasons why we are in the precarious situation we find ourselves in now is that white European-descended peoples tend to be too individualistic, and too lacking in group cohesion and loyalty. This is something I've blogged about before. We are too focused these days on vertical loyalty, on following 'leaders' who often lead us right up the garden path, rather than on horizontal loyalty, loyalty to our fellows, our own, our kin. We are too ready to look out for Number 1 and let the devil take the hindmost. I just don't think it's right for us to throw our kin to the wolves and let them bear the brunt of the blame for slavery; instead of simply trying to wriggle out of personal responsibility, surely we should be arguing against anybody being held accountable for what was done 150 or more years ago by other people.

It's truly a shame to us that more of us don't know our history, both our personal or family history, and our history as a people and a country. Ignorance is not bliss in this case; ignorance, on the contrary, is leaving us prey for the race hucksters and guilt merchants. It would strengthen us so much if we, first of all, stuck together, instead of trying to find some group among our own to bear the blame, hoping that throwing one of our own to the wolves will spare us. The groups that are usually chosen to take the heat are Southrons, and of course anybody who admits to being a slaveowners' descendant. But I promise you that even sacrificing some people to the gods of Guilt will not appease those hungry gods, just as all these demeaning 'apologies' for slavery are not helping, but only fueling the demands for more. We all surmise that every apology brings us closer to paying reparations.

Playing the grievance-mongers' game is another example of feeding the crocodile, which will not guarantee that he will spare you, but only that he will devour you last.

Stop doomsday: turn off your lights

Have you read about the lights going off around the world?

''SYDNEY/LONDON (Reuters) - People switched off lights across the world on Saturday, dimming buildings, hotels, restaurants and bars to show concern at global warming.

Up to 30 million people were expected to switch off their lights for 60 minutes by the time "Earth Hour" -- which started at 8 p.m. in Suva in Fiji and Christchurch in New Zealand -- completed its cycle westwards.''

Are any of you observing 'Earth Hour' and turning off your lights at the designated time? Apparently we're supposed to turn off our lights at 8 o'clock local time, according to what I have heard.

This is typical liberal 'activism': a symbolic show with little of substance behind it. As if turning off our lights for 60 minutes would forestall this global warming doomsday that they keep prophesying.

It's not that I am one of those 'conservatives' who scorns concern for the environment just because of the liberal hysteria aboout it. It's true that the left and the liberals go overboard in their obsessing about Mother Earth, and it's true that much of their purported concern for the environment is limited to a kind of neo-Luddite hatred of our first-world lifestyle, mingled with a loathing for Big Business and all its works. However, having said that, I don't completely disregard environmental concerns; I think much of the damage to the environment is a result of overpopulation in most of the world, and of course 'most of the world' is taken up by the hallowed 'developing countries', who are for some reason held blameless when it comes to environmental damage. The best thing that could be done for the environment would be to stop all this reckless overpopulating, which is, after all, the main reason for this flood of immigration which threatens to overwhelm the entire Western world. Third World peoples keep breeding recklessly and irresponsibly, and of course they and their countries cannot support the children they are bringing into the world, so the overflow is being dropped on our doorstep, and we are being forced to deal with it.

For years, for decades, actually, the left has preached that our First World lifestyle is evil. Now, with the belief that we are on the 'Global Warming Eve of Destruction,' they preach more insistently than ever that we have to stop burning fossil fuels and living our generally wasteful and ecologically irresponsible way of life. Books like 'Small is Beautiful' and leftist films like 'Koyaanisqatsi' idealized the primitive lifestyle of Third World peoples and shamed us for living as we do. We should emulate the primitives, so the message implied, and "live simply that others may simply live." While there is a grain of good advice there, and no doubt simpler living would be healthier for all of us, it is just one more piece of hypocrisy from the left. Why do I say this? Because if they really, honestly believed what they say and preach, they would do all in their power to see that these 'noble savages' remained in their Third World Edens, living their 'small and beautiful' lifestyle. The last thing leftist and liberals should want, if man-made global warming is really occurring, is to bring as many as possible from the Third World to join in our First World lifestyle. Mass immigration to the West is, if anything, only accelerating global warming, as we add tens of millions of new consumers and more cars on the roads, meaning more emissions and more waste dumped in our environment. Does this make even an iota of sense? Of course it doesn't.

I might conclude that the global-warming, 'sky-is-falling' crowd don't really believe their own prophecies of looming disaster. I might wonder if they are cynically manufacturing panic about 'global warming' just to push their agenda.

However it may well be that they believe what they are saying; liberals and leftists have no problem holding many contradictory positions and professing illogical beliefs.

Why is it that they can't, or won't, see the deleterious role mass immigration is playing in their supposed global warming scenario?

I tend to be something of an agnostic on whether or not global warming is a long-term trend, whether it is irreversible, or whether it is merely part of the cycles in our climate that come and go. I tend to think the latter. However I suppose one could argue, as a conservative, that it would be better to prepare for the worst and to try to fend off any global warming which would tend to be disruptive of human society or destructive of human life. But then again, if global warming is happening, and if it is happening as rapidly as the doomsayers insist, is it even possible to stop it, much less to reverse it? Are we human beings really powerful enough to effect permanent changes in the earth's cycles by our relatively puny human efforts? And what could we realistically do, short of destroying all our modern technology and returning to a primitive lifestyle? How realistic would that be?

It might be a good thing in many ways, including from the perspective of improving the quality of our lives, to simplify the way we live, and return to living more as our ancestors did two or three generations ago. But can we, and would even returning to the horse-and-buggy days remove the environmental Sword of Damocles hanging over us?

I don't know that many leftists would sign on to such a program. I think their constant cries of 'repent! The time is at hand!' are mostly just secular versions of the warnings of the old prophets of the Bible. For many leftists and liberals, their politics are their religion, and although many of them scoff at Christian beliefs in heaven and hell, they very much believe that heaven and hell are here on earth.

In his 'Screwtape Letters', C.S. Lewis has his character, the devil's minion Screwtape, instructing the apprentice "Wormwood" on the devil's plans for humanity:

"...we want a man hagridden by the Future -- haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth...''
The idea was to make people believe that they had it in their power to attain heaven on earth or avert hell on earth.
This is the hubris of the liberal.

Unfortunately, it isn't just the left; we have the globalists, including transnational business interests, pushing for a one-world order, and the global warming scare is another tool they are employing to convince us that we must accept a powerful global government, along with a drop in our living standards, and the loss of our national sovereignty and personal freedoms. And people will accept these things, if they become convinced that it is necessary to avert the global warming hell.

America's ''birth defect''

We've heard Obama and his groupies refer to America's ''original sin'' of slavery and now we have Condoleezza Rice saying that our country is defective from birth.

Now may we please dispense with the nonsense that Miss Rice is a 'conservative' and that she is above the race-baiting and politically correct victimolatry? She is a liberal with an R after her name, but a liberal nonetheless.

I still believe that 99.9999 percent of blacks, whether they vote Republican or Democrat, or neither, think in terms of their race 100 percent of the time, and truly cannot see beyond their sense of racial grievance and entitlement.

Even the much-venerated Thomas Sowell, who is the darling of the 'colorblind conservatives', resorts to racial excuse-making when he does write about black dysfunction (which granted, he does not often write about), as in his book called 'Black Rednecks and White Liberals'. In that work he blames 'cracker culture,' the Scots-Irish culture of the South, for influencing African slaves in America towards

''...an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship,… and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.''

Shelby Steele, too, continues to write about white guilt, which he seems to imply is justified, although he says some things that white conservatives, eagerly seeking black counterparts, read as being somewhat conservative in tone.

''People often deny white guilt by pointing to its irrationality--"I never owned a slave," "My family got here eighty years after slavery was over." But of course almost nothing having to do with race is rational. That whites are now stigmatized by their race is not poetic justice; it is simply another echo of racism's power to contaminate by mere association.

It seems Steele focuses exclusively on the 'black experience', as do almost all black people in any area of public life. Everything is about race, and about their victimhood and grievances. Now, if we really are all the same under the skin, as the politically correct faithful insist, why are there not more blacks who can step outside their blackness and their victimhood once in a while?

Obviously Condi Rice cannot do that. She has made numerous and gratuitous references to her childhood in the Jim Crow South, and alludes to various traumatic events she suffered as a child -- such as the time a store clerk told her not to touch merchandise. That's an example of the very kind of thing I mentioned yesterday, in which blacks interpret every unpleasant social interaction as 'racism.' I have news for Miss Condoleezza: most of us, as children, were scolded or warned by store clerks not to touch things. However more often than not, our parents scolded and warned us first that we weren't to touch things or pick them up. But Condi's mother, according to the story, defiantly told Condi to pick up whatever she wanted, as if this was an act of principled civil disobedience or something.

The rest of us, had our mothers defied store clerks and told us to do as we pleased in a department store, would have been shown the door and probably told, curtly, not to come back.

Now Condoleezza is lecturing us about our national birth defects:

''Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national "birth defect" that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country's very founding.

"Black Americans were a founding population," she said. "Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding."

As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."

"That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today," she said.''

In what sense were blacks the co-founders of America? That is just overcompensating rhetoric. I am sorry that Rice feels that she and her family have been eternally wronged by America (although she protests that black people loved America even when we 'didn't love them') but there is no honest way in which we can say that Africans founded America, or were a 'founding population.' We have had to put up with and assent to such lies and distortions for the past several decades and some of us are getting mightily fed up with the fairytales and delusions, no matter that they supposedly have the good intention of making people 'feel better about themselves.' The truth is the truth, and a lie is a lie, no matter how benevolently intended.

And what makes us hard to confront and talk about this history is not that it is a 'birth defect', whatever that means, but because we always have to hold our tongues and submit to harangues and sermons and accusations, most of which are rife with falsehoods, and we cannot speak in defense of our ancestors without being called 'racists'. That, Miss Rice, is why it's so hard to 'confront it,' and 'talk about it.' And it will always be hard to confront it as long as you and yours are intent on telling lies and fables and expecting us to agree and submit.

As far as blacks being a 'founding population', records indicate they didn't arrive in Jamestown until a dozen years after its founding, and until nine years after the Pilgrims founded their colonies in New England. How can you found something which was fully established before you even arrived? And how can someone who supposedly arrived in chains, knowing nothing of the culture and the technology in the new colonies, 'found' or help found those colonies? That is simply nonsense.

How long do we have to humor these fantasists? How long do we have to play along with their game of 'let's pretend"? We are grown people; we should be able to speak the truth and go from there. We should all be able to acknowledge reality even if it doesn't allow us to exaggerate our own importance and aggrandize ourselves at someone else's expense.

The worst part of this grand game of 'let's pretend' is that our younger generations, our children, are denied the truth; they are being taught that their ancestors were just the perennial bad guys who stole and cheated and enslaved. Our children will never have an accurate picture of our people and our common past as long as we have to play these games and feign belief in these stories about the past. Our progeny are being denied their right to their own history, and being made to be scapegoats for the imagined 'original sin' and 'birth defects' of the bad old America of the past.

The prescient Henry George

Henry George, in his work called Social Problems, written in 1883, wrote a great deal that seems to resonate today, even though he lived in a very different time than ours.

George witnessed the effects of the great wave of immigrants that broke on our shores starting in the mid-19th century. He recognized some very important factors in the development of America, and he sensed the pressures that were building with the growth of our country which began during that era of mass immigration.

In some ways, the changes that were happening in George's time are similar to the changes we are seeing in our day, although of course the magnitude of change is greater today. Another factor which was very different in George's day was that, along with all the immigration from Europe, our country was also increasing population by natural means; birth rates were quite high at that time, and so Americans were on the move, looking for more space and more opportunity.

"And across the continent, from east to west, from the older to the newer States, an even greater migration is going on. Our people emigrate more readily than those of Europe, and increasing as European immigration is, it is yet becoming a less and less important factor of our growth, as compared with the natural increase of our population. At Chicago and St. Paul, Omaha and Kansas City, the volume of the westward-moving current has increased, not diminished. From what, so short a time ago, was the new West of unbroken prairie and native forest, goes on, as children grow up, a constant migration to a newer West.

This westward expansion of population has gone on steadily since the first settlement of the Eastern shore. It has been the great distinguishing feature in the conditions of our people. Without its possibility we would have been in nothing what we are. Our higher standard of wages and of comfort and of average intelligence, our superior self-reliance, energy, inventiveness, adaptability and assimilative power, spring as directly from this possibility of expansion as does our unprecedented growth. All that we are proud of in national life and national character comes primarily from our background of unused land."

This is an important point. It is pertinent to the entry I wrote the other day, 'Flight or Fight?' Our ancestors were a mobile people, always looking for better opportunities elsewhere. And the open spaces, the vast areas of the West that still remained to be settled and developed would, in a few generations, become scarcer. George noted that this closing of the frontiers would have social repercussions; these frontiers would cease to be available as a safety valve for a restless people.

''It may be doubted if the relation of the opening of the New World to the development of modern civilization is yet fully recognized. In many respects the discovery of Columbus has proved the most important event in the history of the European world since the birth of Christ. How important America has been to Europe as furnishing an outlet for the restless, the dissatisfied, the oppressed and the downtrodden; how influences emanating from the freer opportunities and freer life of America have reacted upon European thought and life -- we can begin to realize only when we try to imagine what would have been the present condition of Europe had Columbus found only a watery waste between Europe and Asia, or even had he found here a continent populated as India, or China, or Mexico, were populated.

And, correlatively, one of the most momentous events that could happen to the modern world would be the ending of this possibility of westward expansion. That it must sometime end is evident when we remember that the earth is round.

Practically, this event is near at hand. Its shadow is even now stealing over us. Not that there is any danger of this continent being really overpopulated. Not that there will not be for a long time to come, even at our present rate of growth, plenty of unused land or of land only partially used. But to feel the results of what is called pressure of population, to realize here pressure of the same kind that forces European emigration upon our shores, we shall not have to wait for that.''

A little more than a century after George wrote these words, we are seeing these pressures of population increasing, as there are no more lands for westward expansion.

''What I want to point out is that we are very soon to lose one of the most important conditions under which our civilization has been developing -- that possibility of expansion over virgin soil that has given scope and freedom to American life, and relieved social pressure in the most progressive European nations. Tendencies, harmless under this condition, may become most dangerous when it is changed. Gunpowder does not explode until it is confined. You may rest your hand on the slowly ascending jaw of a hydraulic press. It will only gently raise it. But wait a moment till it meets resistance!''

George warned that once the safety valve of open spaces no longer existed, the 'new wine' which had been poured into old bottles would ferment, and pressures would have to be relieved lest this have disastrous consequences.

George was something of a populist and a reformer; his views seem rather liberal on many issues, such as the causes of poverty, but as was typical for his day, he had what would now be called rather 'racialist' ideas about the Anglo-Saxon race and the European race generally. He argued against Chinese immigration, and he did so in terms that would almost certainly be denounced as 'bigoted' and 'xenophobic' in our priggish, PC era.

He was certainly no multiculturalist, and no believer in indiscriminate mixtures of populations in our country.

''Now it is not merely that the greater the difference in language, customs and habits of thought, the greater the difficulties of assimilation between different peoples brought into contact, but the greater the difference the less powerfully do assimilative forces act, for the greater are the tendencies, both attractive and repulsive, to the formation and maintenance of separate societies in which the peculiarities of each are perpetuated.''

George not only recognized the great cultural/racial differences between Europeans and Chinese, and the non-assimilable qualities of the Chinese in America, but he pointed out that cheap immigrant labor depressed wages, a fact which some stubbornly refuse to acknowledge even now.

''He [the Chinese immigrant] may learn something of the languages, something of the laws, and religion and arts and customs, and may adopt some of the methods and habits of the country in which he sojourns, just as the English in India learn and adopt such things of the natives; but as the Englishman in India remains an Englishman and does not become a Hindoo, so does the Chinaman in America remain essentially a Chinaman.

[...]Thus Chinese immigration differs from European immigration in being practically non-assimilable.

[...]That in course of time should their immigration continue, the Chinese would bring their women and permanently settle, just as they have permanently settled in parts of the East Indies, there can be little doubt, but from all appearance and experience this would not be because they had become Americanized but because a permanent Chinese community had been here founded.
[...]This non-assimilability of the Chinese immigration gives a practical importance to all its characteristics, which they would not have if it could be assumed that they would in this country melt away and finally disappear. And that characteristic of the Chinese which is of most practical importance is that they are habituated to a standard of comfort much lower than that of American laborers and much lower even than that of any people whom we receive from Europe. Wages in China touch the absolute minimum that will support life. This at once furnishes a powerful incentive to immigration and enables the Chinese to underbid any competitors in the labor market.
[...]It is from this fact, that the Chinese can, and where necessary to secure employment do, work cheaper than white laborers, that the hostility to their immigration, which shows itself where they have come among us in any numbers, primarily proceeds; and the fundamental difference between those who ask and those who oppose restriction of Chinese immigration will generally be found to be a difference of opinion as to whether cheap labor is an injury or a benefit.''

George also noted that not only were wages depressed by cheap immigrant labor, but he said that the white population of California was less than it would have been had the Chinese laborers not been imported here. In other words, the Chinese actually displaced white laborers. Obviously there are some very close parallels to the illegal Latino immigrants of our day, so what George said also applies to our present situation. George argues against the claims that it was cruel or unethical to exclude Chinese immigrants:

"The ethical considerations which are so often urged against any proposition to shut out Chinese immigration have no force when the real character and effects of that immigration are understood. A conscientious individual may fully recognize his duty toward his neighbor, and yet see that to bring under the same roof with his own family, a family of totally different habits, would be to demoralize instead of elevate, and to produce quarrels and ill will where there should be harmony. And so may one fully imbued with that higher patriotism which regards the whole world as its country and all mankind as brethren, see clearly that such an admixture of peoples as is involved in any considerable Chinese immigration to the United States would be to the degradation of the superior civilization without any commensurate improvement of the lower, and that regarded from the highest standpoint it would tend to check the general progress of the race, not to advance it.
[...]It is not merely the supreme law of self-preservation which justifies us in shutting out a non-assimilable element fraught for us with great social and political dangers, but a regard for the highest interests of the race. It is not that national vanity against which the philosopher should carefully guard, but the obvious fact which it were blindness to ignore, that European civilization as developed on the freer field of the American continent represents the highest advance yet made by humanity, and that upon the great Anglo-Saxon republic of the new world devolves in the era now opening the leadership of the nations.''

Imagine the hue and cry that would result if any public person said similar things in our day, referring to 'the great Anglo-Saxon republic', describing our civilization as representing the 'highest advance yet made by humanity,' or appealing to the 'highest interests of the race.' George argued that the introduction of incompatible and unassimilable elements actually produced 'race prejudices' and social bitterness, and that for that reason, we should avoid introducing these conflicts.

''Whatever will introduce into the life of the republic race prejudices and social bitterness; whatever will reduce wages and degrade labor, and widen the gulf between rich and poor, it is our duty to guard against not merely for the sake of the republic, but for the best interests of mankind.''

George warned against the possible 'Mongolization' of America due to a flood of Chinese labor, and I am sure that were he able to step into a time machine and visit America in 2008, he would warn against the Mexicanization of America.

Henry George was a brilliant and complex man, who is hard to categorize in our terms; in many ways his views seem liberal, and he is obviously a champion of the common man, and the laborer, but yet he was not like today's liberals and leftists.

His Wikipedia entry here details some of his ideas, such as his land tax. He certainly has his admirers among today's leftists because of his condemnation of the means by which many wealthy people obtain their wealth, but as the Wiki notes, his admirers include many of other political leanings.

"His ideas have also received praise from conservative journalists William F. Buckley, Jr. and Frank Chodorov, as well as free-market economists such as Milton Friedman, Fred E. Foldvary and Stephen Moore. The libertarian political and social commentator Albert Jay Nock was also an avowed admirer, and wrote extensively on the Georgist economic and social philosophy.''

I think an honest examination of the kinds of issues George wrote about will lead us away from the cliche 'left-vs.-right' dichotomy today; we can consider the globalists and see that both left and right are acting in collusion. Many of us on the right have learned a knee-jerk defense of capitalism when it is becoming clearer by the day that corporate interests are just as much a part of this undeclared war on the peoples of the West as are the assorted ragtag communists and leftists. I think we will have to look beyond the old categories and examine the ideas of men like Henry George.

Goliad, Texas, 27 March, 1836

Each year on this day, I remember an incident in Texas history called the Goliad Massacre, also the 'Palm Sunday Massacre' because Palm Sunday fell that year, in 1836, on 27 March. I will reproduce part of my last year's entry on this event, so for those of you who were here last year, I hope you will forgive the repetition. But to me this is something we should remember, especially when it seems the Mexican war never really ended, but simply passed into another, more insidious phase.

But on this day, March 27th, in 1836, 330 Texans of some 357 who were prisoners of the Mexicans were slaughtered at the town called Goliad in south Texas.

Here is a link to some survivor accounts of the massacre, with the excerpt below from the account of Dillard Cooper.

"Our detachment was marched out in double file, each prisoner being guarded by two soldiers, until within about half a mile southwest of the fort, we arrived at a brush fence, built by the Mexicans. We were then placed in single file, and were half way between the guard and the fence, eight feet each way. We were then halted, when the commanding officer came up to the head of the line, and asked if there were any of us who understood Spanish. By this time, there began to dawn upon the minds of us, the truth, that we were to be butchered, and that, I suppose, was the reason that none answered. He then ordered us to turn our backs to the guards. When the order was given not one moved, and then the officer, stepping up to the man at, the head of the column, took him by the shoulders and turned him around.

By this time, despair had seized upon our poor boys, and several of them cried out for mercy. I remember one, a young man, who had been noted for his piety, but who had afterwards become somewhat demoralized by bad company, falling on his knees, crying aloud to God for mercy, and forgiveness. Others, attempted to plead with their inhuman captors, but their pleadings were in vain, for on their faces no gleam of piety was seen for the defenseless men who stood before them. On my right hand, stood Wilson Simpson, and on my left, Robert Fenner. In the midst of the panic of terror which seized our men, and while some of them were rending the air with their cries of agonized despair, Fenner called out to them, saying: "Don't take on so, boys; if we have to die, let's die like brave men.''

That last part of the account never fails to move me to tears, while at the same time it makes me proud.

I had one kinsman that I know of among those massacred; one of those 'boys' who died like brave men. He was part of Captain Winn's Company, which was the 1st Regiment, Texas Volunteers. His name is among the lists on this page.


According to other sources

The dead were then stripped, and their naked bodies thrown into piles. A few brush were placed over them, and an attempt made to burn them up, but with such poor success, that their hands and feet, and much of their flesh, were left a prey to dogs and vultures! Texas has erected no monument to perpetuate the memory of these heroic victims of a cruel barbarism ; yet they have a memorial in the hearts of their countrymen more durable than brass or marble.''

There is now a memorial to the heroic dead at the site of the massacre.

The story of the Alamo, and the tragic end of the defenders there, is well-known to most Americans, but Goliad is probably not a familiar name to anybody except Texans. We learned about it in school. Texas History was a part of the seventh grade curriculum when I was growing up; it still is, although I hear it has been completely politically corrected.

At this time, I am not inclined to give in to the pressure to forget the bitter history of this era; the Mexicans have not given up their claim on the Southwest, and increasingly it looks as though they intend to claim the whole continent. But I have not forgotten the Alamo and Goliad.

To the Mexicans, the war has merely shifted to another front, and is fought by other means, like unarmed invasion and demographic takeover and the use of our liberal courts and laws against the citizens of this country, But make no mistake; the Mexican 'reconquistas' see this country as theirs by right. It's only we who have seemingly surrendered, or who think we are at peace with Mexico.

Goliad, for all the tragedy of the loss of 330 men, was a precursor to a major victory for the Texans at San Jacinto a few weeks later, on April 21, 1836. 'Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!' were the cries heard at San Jacinto. Gen. Sam Houston, on the eve of that battle, wrote these words:

"To the People of Texas: We view ourselves on the eve of battle. We are nerved for the contest, and must conquer or perish…We must act now or abandon all hope."

Are we of this generation 'nerved for the contest' as Sam Houston and his men were back then? Do we recognize our perilous situation, as they did?

Thus I ended my blog entry last year. This year, sadly, finds me somewhat more discouraged as it seems obvious that too many of us don't recognize our perilous situation, and we seem even weaker as a country and as a people than we were in 2007. But Sam Houston's words, 'We are nerved for the contest, and must conquer or perish...We must act now or abandon all hope." Houston and his men did act, and they prevailed. Now we have to carry on that determination.

White privilege, white guilt?

Selwyn Duke, always interesting, has a new piece up at American Thinker about 'cultural affirmative action.'

In a way, I prefer the old, overt affirmative action. While it was government-sanctioned discrimination, at least it was, in some measure, more honest than our cultural affirmative action. There is such a thing. It's when people in the market and media privilege others -- sometimes unconsciously -- based upon the latter's identification with a "victim group."

Probably a majority of Americans in some degree or other practice cultural affirmative action. They have the best of intentions, many feeling an obligation to right history's wrongs. And they point to continuing disparities disadvantaging blacks as a group. So they make an extra effort to be sensitive and maybe once in awhile the ones with power even let their thumb rest on the scale when it comes to redressing past grievances.''

Duke quotes a Financial Times piece by Christopher Caldwell about a new book, called Racial Paranoia:

''...In Racial Paranoia (Basic Books, $26/£15.99), the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr suggests that extravagant theories of white racism - from the widespread Aids rumour to Louis Farrakhan's allegation that the US actually blew up the levees to cause the deadly New Orleans floods during Hurricane Katrina - have their roots in the decorous language that mostly white leaders have invented for talking about race.

The US has not managed to eliminate racism, Mr Jackson thinks, but it has succeeded in eliminating racist talk. Remarks the slightest bit "insensitive" draw draconian punishment. White people, because they feel thoroughly oppressed by this regime, assume that it must be some kind of "gift" to minorities, especially blacks.

It is not. It is more like a torment. It renders the power structure more opaque to blacks than it has ever been, leaving what Mr Jackson calls a "scary disconnect between the specifics of what gets said and the hazy possibilities of what kinds of things are truly meant". If the historic enemies of your people suddenly began talking about you in what can fairly be called a secret code, how inclined would you be to trust in their protestations of generosity?''

Duke talks about how most politically correct people choose to lie to themselves rather than be faced with the uncomfortable choice of telling dangerous and unpopular truths, or feigning belief in them (and thus being hypocritical). It makes more sense to talk oneself into believing the platitudes on race, thus avoiding a real and painful examination of the issue.

Duke makes a lot of sense here, although I am not certain that I quite understand the point Christopher Caldwell is making in the quote above.

But if I understand Duke's idea of ''cultural affirmative action", I take it to mean the kind of extra consideration and leeway most well-intentioned people give to minorities. I've done it, and many if not most of you probably have, too.

Ever since the 60s and the Civil Rights revolution, and even before then, there was a perception that black people and other minorities, to a lesser extent, had it hard, and that they needed to be treated rather more charitably than fellow whites. These days, it's almost never condescension which motivates this kind of exaggerated politeness and saccharine niceness, but it's a genuine admiration on the part of many people who really do see minorities, particularly blacks, as being better than the rest of us in some ways, according to the trendy popular 'wisdom' of our day. Blacks, supposedly, have more style; they can dance. They are funnier. They are more expressive, whereas we are inhibited, stiff, and uptight. They have more verve and more hipness. And then there's the victimhood thing, which in our strange age is seen as an attractive quality; victimhood confers a kind of aura of nobility and worth to the victim. They are by definition good and innocent, and put-upon by evil people -- which in this context is us, or at least our racial brethren. Some people assuage their own sense of guilt by scolding and condemning their fellow whites so as to distance themselves and establish their own moral superiority. So pride and vanity play a part in this; it isn't all altruism or conspicuous generosity towards ones' lessers.

I think this exaggerated solicitude for minorities has roots in the idea that they really are in fact not our equals, but yet it's reassuring somehow to think that if only WE did more to 'help' them, their lives would be improved. The fact that they are not in every way our equals, economically or socially, is seen as our fault. So this in effect makes us feel that we have power over their circumstances; if we caused their ''plight'' then we can correct it also. We are again in a superior position. I wonder if liberals ever stop and think about it from that angle? I doubt it.

I can think of a number of cases when, as a liberal, I practiced this kind of 'affirmative action' towards blacks. When I had black employees under my supervision and authority, I tended to cut them more slack, and to be less likely to reprimand or 'crack down' on them. I wanted to be seen as a decent person and of course that meant leaning over backward to establish that I was not racist, but in fact their 'friend.' Was my leniency and preferential treatment appreciated? No; I was in fact taken advantage of because of it. I was viewed as something of a target, someone whose foolish good nature was to be exploited. I knew it and allowed it to happen because I was so indoctrinated.
Yet it took me years to acknowledge it.

Earlier, in the late 60s when I was a student, there were suddenly many black students in college because of outreach efforts, and many of them were not college material -- just as many of all races these days are not.

I had a black female classmate with a pronounced 'attitude' who constantly complained, loudly, that whites had everything easy, had everything handed to them, while Negroes (that was the accepted word then) had to struggle for everything. Whenever I got an A on a test, she would say it was because of my color, whereas her D's were because of her color. She asked, eventually, to cheat off my exam papers -- and, more fool me, I allowed her to. Why? Was it guilt? I really and truly did not feel guilty, and even less did I believe that anybody 'handed' everything to me; I knew I worked and studied for my A's, and I could see that she was not an A student; it wasn't ''prejudice'' that caused her low grades. But I suppose I felt sorry for her, because I knew she would have a tough time finishing college -- and maybe that is ''racism'' -- or is it realism?

But I was exhibiting racial bias when I let her cheat off my exam paper; I would never have let a white student do that. I was showing pro-black bias. And I'm not the only one to have done so. It's even more rife, this pro-minority bias, today than it was then.

When I hear the constant cries of racism, I find it ironic, because the most common form of racism exhibited by white people is the racial favoritism and altruism they show toward blacks. I have seen far more fawning over blacks than I have ever seen gratuitous unkindness toward blacks. I've witnessed far more white people, say, in retail settings, being excessively, fulsomely friendly towards blacks, while being indifferent or even rude toward their fellow whites. I've seen plenty of whites engaging in arguments with fellow whites over racial matters, and siding with minorities against their own fellow whites. This is the most common form of racial bias I see: anti-white, pro-minority racial bias. I see many whites who can scarcely say a good word about their fellow whites but who can only fawn over blacks and other minorities. It carries no social stigma to discriminate against fellow whites in favor of minorities, whereas any careless word to or about minorities risks considerable consequences. And the more 'multicultural' and open we are, the more social prestige accrues to us.

Why, then, do blacks and other minorities perceive so much rudeness and discrimination in their interactions with whites? How can it be that I see whites being ingratiating and smarmy towards minorities, while minorities claim that whitey is usually rude and insulting to them?

In my own personal experience, I've seen instances where the casual rudeness of a retail clerk, for example, is perceived subjectively as being racially motivated, even when it is utterly impersonal. I knew a woman who was convinced that a snooty clerk was condescending to her specifically because of her race, although there was no indication that race was a factor at all. As I tried to tell her: the offending woman was simply ill-mannered. We all encounter such people. But when you see the world completely through a racial prism, and imagine that every unpleasant thing that happens in life is due to ''racism'' then you will see racism everywhere. I think much, if not most, of the complaints of 'bias' and 'racism' are rooted in nothing more than the random rudeness we all have to deal with in our increasingly uncivil society. I wonder if blacks really believe that they and only they have to deal with incivility or casual rudeness? I think in their fantasies about ''white privilege'' they believe that whites truly have a red carpet laid out for them wherever they go, and that life is all smooth sailing for whites.

I think whites, too, have come to believe in the idea of 'white privilege' and they are forever overcompensating for this imagined privilege. Maybe when we are fully second- or third-class citizens (after blacks and Hispanics) in our own country will people feel that the 'playing field has been leveled.'

And those whites who are motivated by a feeling of pity because of the disparities between the races, as I was in my misguided youth, have to come to a realization as I did that life is inherently unfair, and that above all, we are not responsible for everybody. It is not in our power to be godlike and make everybody equal to everybody else. We can't remove all the obstacles that life puts in the paths of minorities; it is not possible for us to make things easy and comfortable for the entire world. The best we can do is to take care of ourselves and those nearest to us should they need help. We are not superhuman. People who truly believe in 'equality' as an ideal should recognize that we are at least equal in our lack of omnipotence. None of us can eliminate life's travails, and to acknowledge our common human limitations would be a first step towards getting over our liberal god complex.

But remember, it's just a social construct

Here is another one of those silly stories about the family trees of the various candidates, with the spin being that we are all, again, just cousins. Pay no attention to the fact that Obama has Kenyan ancestry; he is the cousin of many prominent white folks, past and present, including even some movie idols. Isn't that wonderful? Yes, we are all one big, happy family, and the differences are only skin deep.

''Clinton is related to [Brad] Pitt's girlfriend, Angelina Jolie.

Researchers at the New England Historic Genealogical Society found some remarkable family connections for the three presidential candidates — Democratic rivals Obama and Clinton, and Republican John McCain.

Clinton, who is of French-Canadian descent on her mother's side, is also a distant cousin of singers Madonna, Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette. Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, can call six U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush, his cousins. McCain is a sixth cousin of first lady Laura Bush.
[...]
Genealogist Christopher Child said that while the candidates often focus on pointing out differences between them, their ancestry shows they are more alike than they think.

"It shows that lots of different people can be related, people you wouldn't necessarily expect," Child said.

Obama has a prolific presidential lineage that features Democrats and Republicans. His distant cousins include President George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. Other Obama cousins include Vice President Dick Cheney, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and Civil War General Robert E. Lee.''
[Emphasis mine]

Well, they've already claimed Jefferson Davis as one of Obama's kin, now Robert E. Lee himself is said to be just a cousin of Barack Hussein. Do you think there is any agenda at work here?

Personally I would like to see the actual family trees posted online, so that we can examine them and judge their accuracy for ourselves, or, in the case of people with genealogical experience, check the sources and the details of each lineage to see whether they line up with established facts. So far, it's just the word of a couple of genealogists whose credentials are unknown to the vast reading public.

I remember that during the last election, I read a similar article about how Bush and Kerry were kin, being distant cousins via their New England colonial ancestry. Not so coincidentally, considering my own Massachusetts colonial ancestry, I learned via that article that Kerry is one of my many distant cousins through our common Bulkeley ancestors. Another article established that Howard Dean was a distant cousin to both of them I believe, via the same ancestral line, and hence he too would be kin to me. But this is not surprising considering that there were something like 21,000 original Puritan settlers in New England and they formed the basis of the population of the New England states until the great wave of immigration in the mid-19th century. So most of those with colonial New England stock are related, however distantly. I suspect that some of you who have New England origins would also be related to me and of course to Kerry, Dean, et al.

Similarly, people throughout the South who have colonist ancestors are descended from the original Jamestown colonists in many cases, as well as to later waves of Huguenot settlers and Germanna colonists. One of my fellow bloggers, who is linked on my blogroll, has several family connections to me via these families. Many of us who have early roots in this country are kin to each other. Of course all of us have many thousands of living cousins, most of whom will never be known to us. Genealogy was one way in which I began to be aware of how connected I am, via blood, to many, many Americans. We are truly an extended family, not just in a metaphorical sense.
It was an odd feeling to learn that a distant cousin of mine with whom I became acquainted via sharing family history had lived very near to me in a West Coast city back in the 1960s for a brief time; we lived a few blocks apart and frequented some of the same places. We might well have met and never been aware of our family connection.

But back to the candidates' genealogy: I was morbidly curious to know whether Bill Richardson, (or Bill ''Call Me Lopez" Richardson, as Tanstaafl dubs him), was kin to me, based on his one-fourth New England Yankee ancestry, but I found no connection when I researched his family tree. I can't say I was disappointed to find no connection. Likewise I found no connection to Obama's Dunham ancestry among my own ancestors.

I have learned that John Edwards may be a distant cousin to me, based on his Dillard ancestry, according to this website. How accurate the information is on the site, I don't know.

Being as heritage and kin-oriented as I am, genealogy is an interest of mine and I've found it a fascinating way to learn more about history in a very specific way as I read through old documents: public records, wills, letters, and various bits of information. It makes history much more real and personal to learn about it via our ancestors' own life experiences.

I've found that in general, people become more interested in their ancestry later in life; many of us become more interested in the past, and in our own personal origins, as we age. But some never become interested, and I think this is an attitude that is especially common in our age, as people tend to denigrate the past, and to view it as one long dark age, with our generation emerging as the pinnacle of evolution and enlightenment.

Some of the people in my own family are indifferent at best to genealogy and their roots; 'what has that got to do with me?' seems to be the attitude. And then there are the genealogical agnostics, who say ''how can you even know if any of that stuff is true?" We can know it's true if we find records and sources; family legends are often fanciful and erroneous, and much of what is online is inaccurate and must be double-checked. Some of it is patently false and unfounded. Some of the family lore is quite accurate; my grandmother asserted she had a lot of Welsh ancestry, and research proved this true. Some of the older generations carefully preserved oral knowledge of our forebears, and there was a great deal of careful record-keeping which has come to light. So the agnostics are wrong to say that it's all just fable or conjecture.

However, I suspect much of this business about how Obama is a cousin to many presidents and celebrities is a further effort to make him seem all-American and well-connected. And considering that there is an obvious political agenda at work, I take these 'facts' about his ancestry with a copious helping of salt.

And speaking of ancestry, I have noticed a very common complaint among 'conservatives' about Obama is that he identifies as black. They keep asking why he doesn't consider himself white, considering his white mother. I find this a curious question: if any of us saw Obama on the street, and he was a stranger to us, would we consider him white, or would we judge him as black or ''African-American'' at a glance? I would say the latter. We might think he had some non-African ancestry but then again so do many blacks in this country, and they are not any the less black, as far as their identification is concerned. They tend to identify as black and we identify them as such.

So why are all the 'conservatives' distressed because Obama does not call himself white, or mixed?
I've heard the same lament from the 'colorblind conservatives' about actress Halle Berry; ''why does she call herself black, when she's got white blood'?

I say it's because the black genes tend to be dominant, both in the phenotype, the outward appearance, and in the behavior. I think the 'colorblind conservatives' are being disingenuous to complain because Obama or Halle Berry call themselves black. I've known people much lighter in complexion and much less African in appearance who called themselves African-American. Obama is black, in appearance and in attitude. It does not matter that he 'sounds' white or speaks standard American English like an educated man. He seems to consider himself black and that is what matters. Obviously, like most half-and-half people, he considers himself as belonging to the minority half, and not to the white side. This is just the dynamic of our minority-obsessed society. There are benefits that accrue to people of minority heritage, especially to blacks, who are the elite among victim groups. Hispanics will soon give them a run for their money, literally, as Hispanics are now more numerous and are becoming seen as the 'new and improved' minority group for the 21st century; they are growing in numbers and in clout, and the business interests and politicians are greedy for the favor of Hispanics. In any case, nobody of mixed parentage sees much advantage in identifying with whitey; it's so much cooler and so much more chic and so much more profitable to be one of the exalted 'oppressed' people.

So no, regardless of who is related to whom, Obama is identified the exotic 'other', and not just another member of the big old American family.

Nothing but the truth

On his blog, Nicholas Stix discusses 'Racial Dialogue in America', linking to a " 'Racist Rant' That Almost Everyone is Condemning", a piece written by a blogger calling himself Old Punk. The post is here.


I think it's a viscerally honest piece, although the author, honest as he basically is, resorts to the usual disclaimers and makes a painstaking effort to say good things about admirable black figures (the usual: Thomas Sowell, Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods, et al) in an effort to avoid being labeled an all-out 'racist.' But his disclaimers, sadly, did not insulate him from the race-baiters of both liberal and ''conservative'' persuasion.

The very volume of the response and the vehemence of the comments shows just how incendiary the whole race issue is these days; is this in itself not absolute proof that Obama has actually polarized this country even further, and set white against white as well as black against white, and white (some) against black? So much for the 'uniter' and the 'transcender'. He is a divider par excellence.

The race issue seems to be more radioactive than ever these days, mostly due to Obama, his 'mentor' Reverend Wright, and the Obama groupies, who are out in force all over the Internet acting as vigilantes for political correctness.

I notice, too, that Steve Sailer, who has been covering the Obama saga more than any other mainstream blogger, has drawn persistent nagging criticism from several anonymous commenters who accuse him of a vendetta against Obama, and of carrying out a 'hit' on Obama. This person, or these several people, are wearisome; I peg them as Obama supporters out policing the blogosphere for their hero, or as whining liberals of either party who see themselves as defenders of PC virtue. If they don't like Sailer's writing about Obama, they should 'change the channel'.

The message is: writing about Obama carries a price; you will be visited by the Obama groupies or the canting liberals of both parties who feel that all this talk about race is just -- racist.

Stix has some good observations about the whole issue, although he is somewhat 'mainstream' for me. But here he says, accurately:

Obama doesn’t want dialogue on race, any more than black people do. Dialogue for them means lecturing, hectoring, and otherwise abusing whites, lying to our faces about race, the more egregious lie the better, and daring us to tell the truth, so they can curse us, assault us, and have us arrested or professionally destroy us. “Dialogue” for blacks and those who think they are blacks, is simply yet another occasion for the exercise of black racial power, you know, the kind they always insist they don’t have.

Go ask Geraldine Ferraro what she thinks of Barack Hussein Obama’s kind of honest racial dialogue. When Ferraro spoke a home truth about Obama’s racial advantage, he immediately demanded she be fired as a Clinton campaign advisor, and she was.''

This is true; 'dialogue' really means monologues or harangues from the 'African-American community', in which we are made to sit like whipped schoolchildren and listen to the accusations and the abuse, and our only permitted response amounts to admitting our guilt and professing remorse. There IS no real dialogue, because, as Merriam-Webster defines dialogue, it involves two sides:

1: a written composition in which two or more characters are represented as conversing

2 a: a conversation between two or more persons; also : a similar exchange between a person and something else (as a computer) b: an exchange of ideas and opinions 'organized a series of dialogues on human rights' c: a discussion between representatives of parties to a conflict that is aimed at resolution

There is no conversation; there is no 'exchange'; there is no movement toward a mutual resolution.

Unfortunately, I still see too many of the otherwise honest white people doing what Old Punk and Stix are doing: trying to prove their good faith by meeting blacks halfway, saying conciliatory, appeasing things. It's tempting to go into the patter about how some of one's best friends and favorite co-workers are black, or how one admires Sowell, Walter Williams, Tiger Woods, or other 'moderate' blacks. A bit of advice to those tempted to do this: it doesn't work. We see in the example of Old Punk's vitriolic commenters that it doesn't appease anyone. Why waste bandwidth or breath in a maneuver that always fails anyway?

Being defensive is a bad choice; if we dignify their accusations by treating them as legitimate, if we become defensive and self-justifying, this is only playing their game, and giving them further opening to attack, as we appear weak.

Around this time, inevitably someone says 'well, do you recommend we descend to their level, or that we go into attack mode?' Not necessarily. Each situation is somewhat different. I do think defensiveness is a bad choice which makes us more vulnerable. It shows that we care too much about their opinions and their name-calling. Once we stop caring so much, we are that much less vulnerable.

Another tack, which I see all too often on the 'conservative' side, is to point the finger back at the liberals and say 'but, but they're racist too! It isn't fair that they can be racist and get away with it."

We can see that tactic on display in the comment thread following this blog entry, which is about a discussion of 'racism' on the TV program ''The View".

''Only white people can be racist according to ‘View’ co-host Joy Behar. Also on the March 24 broadcast, both Behar and Whoopi Goldberg justified Barack Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright by pointing to Bush’s association with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and their many controversial remarks. It could be a valid point if Falwell or Robertson were Bush’s pastor for 20 years. Neither of them ever were.

After Elisabeth Hasselbeck labeled Reverend Wright "racist," Whoopi Goldberg jumped in and alluded to the late Reverend Jerry Falwell’s suggestion that God allowed the September 11 attacks because of secular forces in America. Whoopi asked Elisabeth if she should leave the Republican party because of that. Elisabeth noted that Falwell is not her spiritual adviser. Joy Behar then claimed that Robertson and Falwell are "spiritual advisers" to the Republican party.

Behar then essentially stated it is impossible for those in the "oppressed minority" (African Americans) to be racist. This is according to her college sociology professor.''

Sounds like Ms Behar had the same leftist sociology prof as I had; the difference was, I saw through the rhetoric, even though I was a liberal then, but Ms Behar didn't and still hasn't.

Judging by the extensive quotes from the show transcripts, the women on the show were at their shrill liberal worst, while the token ''conservative'', Elisabeth Hasselbeck, does not acquit herself too well. Of course, with several strident leftist harpies against one lone woman, the odds are not in her favor.

But please read the 'conservative' comments below the piece for examples of 'what not to say' in discussions like this. For example:

''Incredibly stupid people over on the view.

I think it actually insults black (or brown, or whatever) people to say they aren't capable of something. It's like don't worry 'bout nothing, just stay on the plantation and "we'll" take care of you.

Minorities, and women want to be treated as equals. And I wholeheartedly think they should. But as equals, they also must bear responsibilities for their actions. To not hold Obama, or any other minority, or woman, responsible for their actions, is to say they are "just not ready yet" to be equal.

So, using liberal logic, Obama is just not ready yet, to leave the plantation, and become President. (of course, on this I agree)"

This line of argument always blames the problem on 'liberalism', which is partly true, but somewhat of an evasion, because the problem is also with black people -- which is not a permitted thought to have, so conservatives like to blame it all on a political ideology, implying that if more people like Thomas Sowell were raised up as role models, voila, no more race problem.

It also resorts to the tired old retort that liberals are ''the real racists'' whereas conservatives want to help minorities by teaching them responsibility. This is just blame-shifting among whites. It's just pointing the finger back at the accuser and not addressing the root issues -- ultimately because of political correctness.

Nevertheless, the comments show some glimmers of reality, and it seems to show, yet again, that this debate over race is heating up, and that the heat may also create some light. Whether this current state of things will continue and increase during the election -- and I am convinced that the race issue will never go away during Obama's candidacy -- it may be that we will sink back into the status quo. Or it may be that more people will reach their limit of all this race-baiting and haranguing, and that attitudes will change. But if we only get halfway there, stuck in these evasive 'conservative' ideas about the issue, that will not suffice.

Blaming all the problems on 'liberalism' or even worse, just on the Democrats, will not do. It's an evasion, and another bow to political correctness. Sometimes half-truths are worse than outright lies, and this is what we have to guard against now; we can't let our fellow Americans become content with the half-truths and evasions that are now being resorted to in these discussions. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth will suffice.

However I recognize that the truth is too strong, sometimes, to be taken in anything but small doses.

Flight or fight?

This recent article discusses the phenomenon of black flight. We read a great deal about so-called "white flight", but what with the massive influx of immigrants, legal and illegal, in recent decades, it's not only whites that are fleeing, but blacks.

The media have succeeded in downplaying the stories of clashes between blacks and Hispanics in California and elsewhere, but there is no denying that the races, in general, don't get along. And blacks are not any more likely than whites (probably less so) to welcome the transformation of their neighborhoods and towns into Spanish-speaking enclaves.

The article describes the surge in the black population of Victorville, California, as blacks move there from the greater Los Angeles area.

The article does not deal with the white aspect of this situation: are white people then in turn displaced from towns like Victorville, as black people double in population there? One would think so, especially considering the increased crime which has accompanied the demographic change:

''Ken Jones, a high-school dropout who is learning construction skills, says his family moved from Los Angeles to get him away from gangs. It worked—he describes his life in Victorville as a “retirement”. But he says gangs and crime are becoming entrenched. Between 2000 and 2006 the number of robberies in Victorville increased by 62%. “They bring their lifestyle with them,” says Jim Melton, a youth worker.''

Of course they bring their lifestyle with them; this should go without saying. But it is an article of liberal faith these days that people have no intrinsic nature; they are mere products of their environment. If they live in an inner-city slum, that environment causes them to be more crime-prone and to be poor and undereducated. The liberal would never think it the other way: the inner-city slum is a slum because of the traits of the people who inhabit it. Poverty is a result of bad life-choices in many cases, not the cause.

So yes, people bring their ghetto lifestyle with them when they move to quiet little suburbs. And those quiet little suburbs will not be quiet for long.

And the immigrants who are now such a substantial proportion of California's population all brought their 'lifestyles' with them from Mexico or India or China or wherever they arrived from. So their presence will lead to a replication of the conditions they left behind. We see this happening, and yet some people refuse to acknowledge it, because it contradicts liberal dogma.

So blacks are fleeing the immigrant tsunami, and whites are fleeing the influx from the ghettos as well as from the third world.

Why is it that only whites are considered blameworthy for packing up and leaving a transformed area? So many of the articles written about "white flight" take a critical tone, and describe "white flight" as nothing but a manifestation of 'racism' and bigotry. Why is this? Most minorities and white liberals say that 'racism' is a white 'sickness' and that all whites are innately racist. Why, then, is it somehow necessary for minorities to be able to live in proximity to these 'racist' whites, and to be educated with them and work with them? Think about it: it makes no sense. Wouldn't blacks prefer to live among their own, especially since they complain that whitey discriminates against them and treats them rudely? Similarly with Hispanics and other immigrants: they complain of 'gringo' racism and general bad behavior toward them. Why on earth would minorities then complain bitterly when racist whitey does not choose to live among them? Why would they even resort to lawsuits and the use of government force to compel whitey to associate with them?

Another tenet of liberal faith is that separation is bad, immoral, and downright evil.

Why?

Why do blacks and other minorities want to follow 'racists' and remain in close proximity to them? Is this not irrational and counterintuitive? Separation is in some situations highly desirable and healthy for all parties, especially when relations are strained and clashes appear inevitable.

I realize the rationale that is offered for why minorities insist on requiring white people to associate with them. The rationale is that whites keep all good things for themselves and refuse to share the best with non-whites, so they must be forced to allow non-whites to attend their superior schools in their superior and more livable neighborhoods. Non-whites "know" that their schools and neighborhoods are inferior and dysfunctional precisely because whitey has monopolized everything good for himself, and cheated non-whites of their rightful share of all the good things.

White schools supposedly have more money and more resources and more 'pull' with authorities and so they are therefore better than mostly minority schools. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the students, the parents, the home life of the families, so says the liberal dogma. It has to do with 'discrimination' and "institutional racism."
The answer is more contact among the races and more money of course.

Blacks and other minorities see white flight as 'racism' and 'hate' because they think it is a deprivation of their lawful right to associate with whites, even forcibly.

So our controlled liberal media dutifully tsk-tsk about 'white flight', describing it as evidence of ongoing racism on the part of whites.

I've said before, and I believe, that people have a natural affinity for their own kind; people prefer to live among people similar to themselves. We are comfortable with people who have very similar values, customs, preferences, and standards. Like attracts like; birds of a feather flock together, as the old saying has it.

Given this natural affinity for those like ourselves, it is understandable that blacks and Hispanics want to live among their own and worship in churches with others of similar habits and customs. But yet, despite their very obvious preferences for their own, they still complain and raise a fuss at any sign of "white flight" or of any hint of separation or ''segregation''. Why this paradox?

I think they recognize, deep down if not consciously, that the 'better', more desirable neighborhoods and schools and towns ARE better and more desirable because whites tend to create more harmonious, livable, and well-functioning institutions and communities. They realize, although they would never acknowledge it, that they do not create livable places for themselves, but can only seek out what has already been created by others. I suppose this fact must surely foster a lot of resentment: imagine feeling dependent on someone you resent and even despise. It must be a very unpleasant state of being.

But my concern right now is: with the vast game of musical chairs that is being forced on us by our 'elites', what now, as blacks are being displaced by opportunistic immigrants, and whites are now being displaced yet again?

In the past, anyone choosing for whatever reason to become an expatriate might relocate to a congenial Western European country, or another Anglophone country. But now, all these countries are being transformed too, as our possessed rulers are engaged in this frenzied rush to third-world status.

Our enemies among the Aztlan 'reconquista' forces taunt us 'gringos', telling us to ''go back to Europe, Pilgrim!"
Unfortunately this is not a good plan at the moment, as the Camp of the Saints invasion is underway in the lands of our ancestors.

Most of us, in any case, love this country, or at least love our people, and would consider emigration only as a last resort. But where is there a place in this country that is still relatively untouched by the government-assisted invasion? My plan, before I realized how far-gone my country was, involved going back to Texas and finishing my life in the place where several generations of my family lived and died, and being buried with my kin in the family cemetery in south Texas. Now the handwriting is on the wall: it may be that the Trans-Texas Corridor will cut right through that part of Texas, through that very place where I had hoped to sleep one day. And even if it doesn't, the reconquista is practically a fait accompli there; one day I expect that the Lone Star flag will be replaced by the vulture flag of Mexico, and my ancestors' toils in Texas, and the blood they shed, will have been in vain.

So, I considered the Southeast, hoping that some corner of that area would survive with Southron culture intact. But that, too, seems unlikely as I hear of the all-out invasion of the Southeast; there is not only a large Mexican colony there but the 'refugee industry' is feverishly working to settle many exotic people in the Southeast. It looks as though the elites have decided that we old Americans can run but we can't hide. They are, I am convinced, out to foil "white flight" by ensuring that every place is as multicultural as every other place. No pristine corners of old America are to be allowed to survive intact. I find this all very creepy and malevolent. What kind of system wages war on its own people, and unleashes a planned invasion? I am convinced that there is method to this madness; it is not accident. It is chaos, but it is deliberately fostered chaos.

Where is there to flee? Do any of you live in areas which are still intact, or are we all under siege?
I know some of you have talked of relocating, feeling that the cause is lost, and there is nothing to do but move elsewhere. Some have considered Europe or other English-speaking countries; others insist that Europe is worse off than America. Still others have said the opposite is true; Europe has a smaller percentage of foreigners in their midst than we in America, and Europeans have the advantage of a strong national heritage, whereas we in the U.S. have in too many cases bought the 'proposition nation' propaganda or our own heritage is too mixed or too remote to have a strong identity as our European cousins have.

What's the future for us? Is it cowardly or defeatist or disloyal to consider moving, even within our own country?
Should we stand our ground where we are, or is it a lost cause? Where are the places which are likely to survive with enough of their original character intact?

If emigration is the best option, what is the best destination? I have mixed feelings about the appropriateness of running to another country; I think, ideally, Western countries should have very tight immigration policies. Each country should be for the historic people of that country; no country should be held responsible for taking in immigrants from other failed countries. I respect the right of a country to shut the doors to outsiders. Nobody owes it to us to take us in.

Some think that there should be a common overriding 'European' identity, with which many of us could align. But I don't think Europeans feel this way; they have strong national feelings. For instance, some have argued that it's fine for Polish people to immigrate en masse to say, the UK or Ireland "because they are white and they will eventually assimilate and fit in." I don't find that a compelling argument at all. Polish people are not just like British or Irish people, despite their white European origin. Poles have a strong national identity and Polish colonies in Ireland or Britain would be out of place. Polish people should remain in Poland and improve it, just as Mexicans should stay in Mexico and work to improve their dysfunctional country.

Likewise I don't think European countries should be expected to welcome American 'refugees.'
Personally I would never move to a country in which I would be a fish out of water, a country to which I could never assimilate. I think anybody who moves to a place with a different culture should plan to blend in fully, and if that is not possible, they should not go at all.

As for me, I will probably finish out my days in America; my ancestors came here 400 years ago, and some of them many thousands of years ago. I'm a little too old and set in my ways to emigrate but I respect the feelings of those for whom that choice seems the best one.

What are my readers' thoughts and experiences with relocating?