Stringham

@atlanticesque @ClickingSeason I don’t think I agree. Consciousness is also mysterious, almost as mysterious as existence per se. But again, once you stipulate certain things are conscious, the fact that the body from which my consciousness arises is what it is, and not something else, isn’t mysterious.

@str_ingham @ClickingSeason I get what you're saying, but no, hereditarianism still doesn't get you there. To name just one reason why it doesn't, consider a pair of identical twins. Each twin is just one person, and not the other. And there is no reason why.

It’s easier to think you landed in a body and a place by random luck before you have children and watch them walking around the world wearing your face and feeling your feelings

@atlanticesque @ClickingSeason The fact that anything exists at all is infinitely mysterious, and we have no more grasp on the mystery than our most primitive forebears. But once you stipulate that our world as a whole exists, the fact I’m a white American instead of a Nigerian isn’t even slightly mysterious.

@ClickingSeason I get what you’re saying, and I probably overreacted somewhat, but I don’t understand how you could say there’s nothing mysterious. That I exist at all is agonizingly mysterious to me. It doesn’t have any particular political implications, but not everything someone says must.

@dilanesper Sotomayor didn’t write this opinion; her clerks did. At argument, her comments often betray basic misunderstandings of the cases. She is not stupid, but she is not especially smart. Many SCOTUS justices in history weren’t, but in recent years they have been, so she stands out.

In the real world, just this term, Justice Sotomayor authored this 28 page, unanimous opinion on whether New Jersey Transit can claim state sovereign immunity. The opinion contains detailed and comprehensive analysis. supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf…

Just to be clear here, nobody ever actually identifies a bunch of specific cases where Sotomayor or Jackson made dumb arguments, or misunderstood complex issues, or otherwise betrayed a lack of intellect. They just ASSERT the two women of color aren't smart enough.

@BarneyFlames @atlanticesque @WatsonLadd The complete collapse of left-of-center Europhilia is a huge cultural shift that is not talked about enough. It was one of the key things that drew intelligent and artistically inclined white Americans to the left for almost 100 years and it’s just totally gone now.

@atlanticesque @WatsonLadd But the whole edifice of woke admiration relied on the idea that Europe was a magical land of enlightenment free of chuds, that kind of illusion is broken by the mere existence of euro chuds, the actual outcome of the vote is almost irrelevant.

Today being an anglophile is a little quirky, but have we already forgotten the era of Tumblr Anglophilia? From about 2010 to 2015, many young men and nearly every young woman in America was fixated on Bri'ish culture. Union Jack profile pictures, SuperWhoLock fandom peak, etc.

@stanfordNYC @KirkegaardEmil Very interesting point re Jewish downward mobility that I hadn’t seen articulated. Were the Boomer parents professionals who encouraged their kids to do something different, or people who themselves opted out of the rat race but made a decent living in creative professions?

Hi Emil, a few points: 1. The surnames point should be *mostly* fine, because the outmarriage is going in both directions. We can start with a hypothesis that for every half-Jew with a Jewish name that falls within the subset, there is also a half-Jew on the maternal line with a non-Jewish surname (such as myself). This is probably not quite right, since I expect slightly different rates of fertility for households with outmarrying Jewish fathers versus mothers, but pretty close. If we stipulate that the rates are equal, then tracking Jewish surnames should work just fine. 2. Jews are a rapidly shrinking portion of the American cognitive elite, both due to low fertility and due to very high immigration of high-performing East Asians, Indians, and other global talent. 3. The Jewish community's liberal tendencies have, for a sizable portion of the community, militated against perceived elitist behaviors like attending ivy leagues, seeking high-paying, high status work, and so on. This egalitarianism and artsiness of the Boomer Jewish generation is a major contributor to extraordinarily high rates of downwards mobility among their children. Parents were biased against the "rat race" and didn't realize just how high the returns are these days for running in it, and conversely how punishing it is to be left out. Growing up in Brooklyn in the early 2000s, I witnessed this firsthand on a mass scale. The unhappiness engendered by this downward mobility is also a major contributor to Bernie, DSA-style politics.

I think the issues are 1) that due to outbreeding for the American secular Jews, the last names are less indicating of ancestry than they used to be, 2) secular Jews are low fertility in general, 3) racism prevents Whites from enrolling so much including the Jews.

@JHWeissmann I agree the contributions of both have been net positive, but you can’t just say that’s “obvious.” You have to explain how the culture changed and why it’s good. Liberals seem to reject the possibility that any demographic-driven cultural change could be bad, which is absurd imo.

@JHWeissmann You don’t think Jewish immigration and eventual entry into the American elite changed American culture?

@stanfordNYC You could make the case that H-C didn’t fundamentally upset our ethnic mix, since it had nothing to do with the massive influx of Hispanics. Asian immigration is significant ofc, but well below 10%, with below-native birth rates and high outmarriage.

American liberals specifically promised at each stage that their changes to immigration law would not cause the very demographic shifts that they now cheer and gloat about. Sen. Ted Kennedy's infamous words on Hart-Celler: "It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society."

@ModernUrbanism @SidKhurana3607 I’m certain that number 1 will be Salt Lake City, but beyond that I don’t know.

@str_ingham @SidKhurana3607 If I had to guess it’d be OK City or somewhere like Knoxville TN in Appalachia

Top metro areas by Nordic ancestry: Fargo, ND-MN (37.3%) Grand Forks, ND-MN (36.4%) Duluth, MN-WI (35.4%) Minot, ND (29.8%) La Crosse, WI-MN (22.1%) Minneapolis, MN-WI (21.8%) Rochester, MN (20.4%) Bismarck, ND (20.2%)

@Shiftant It looks like her parents are both humanities academics, and the mom in TN is originally from western New York. So she’s actually one of the oldest archetypes of American radicalism: a Seven Sisters grad with roots in the Burned-Over District!

white progs of southern origin may be even more crazy with the anti-whire stuff than white progs of Northern origin, maybe because of some guilt complex. Will Stancil is from North Carolina, Tim Wise from Tennessee (yes, also a quarter Jewish, but still)...

@tolstoybb My boomer libertarian dad has given me the silver speech every time he’s had >4 drinks for like 18 years. I always just laughed at him and compared the chart to the S&P. He’s clowning on my ass so hard this Xmas.

@stanfordNYC It’s shocking to me how few people in the “heritage American” debate seem to appreciate that the overwhelming majority of people who are predominantly descended from colonial British settlers are Southerners.

This is pretty obvious from American political geography, with areas with more colonial American descent (the South, lower Midwest, Western rurals) tending to be much more Republican. Parts of New England are the most notable exception, but relatively low in population.

The frustrating thing about Noah is he'll say things like this that simply aren't true at all. You can get data from the General Social Survey on self-reported ethnicity and political orientation; lo, English, Welsh and Scotch are among the most conservative.

@loquitur_ponte @starryblueisis @xwanyex Yes, my point is just that the large preponderance of people who can claim descent primarily from the colonial British are Southerners, and commentary on the “heritage American” thing often misses this through a seemingly Mayflower-driven focus on New England I find bizarre.

@str_ingham @starryblueisis @xwanyex Ive never contested that, the south, deseret and new england are the three regions that report English ancestry as largest, they're all disproportionately founding stock relative to country as a whole

@loquitur_ponte @starryblueisis @xwanyex And if it were true, those people didn’t go to the postwar South, which had very low immigrant inflows of any kind. So the point still stands that tens of millions of white Southerners are descended predominantly from British colonial settlers.

@loquitur_ponte @starryblueisis @xwanyex I do not think that’s true.

@loquitur_ponte @starryblueisis @xwanyex Scotch Irish would fall within any definition of the concept, since they are colonial British Protestant settlers. In most of the South, a large majority of whites are mostly descended from those settlers. Unlike New England, region was little touched by immigration til recently

@starryblueisis @xwanyex Utah is also dominantly English ancestry. Im not saying its just new england, just disproportionately so (midwest, and parts of Appalachia are very german / scots irish)

@loquitur_ponte @xwanyex No, it’s hugely disproportionately white southerners. The New England WASP liberals have intermarried to a degree that it’s no longer much of a coherent group.

@xwanyex Its clearly an articulable concept, its also disproportionately new england old stock wasp liberals.

@dissproportion Not sure what you mean. There are millions of Americans who are nearly equally as related to the colonial British settlers as a modern Frenchman is to the French of the 1700s. And those settlers have a privileged position in our national heritage.

@str_ingham Yeah, that’s just it. They aren’t really that related to those people for the reasons I mentioned. They have a great identity to claim—they’re American! They can add “white” or “WASP” if it’s really that important to them to be more specific, but “heritage” doesn’t make sense.

The “Heritage American” thing is a little confusing to me. If your great-great-grandmother could trace back to the Mayflower, you probably wouldn’t know about it simply because you wouldn’t have her family’s last name. And even if you can trace one line back that far, you’re less genetically related to that ancestor than all the intervening generations, many if not most of whom are almost certainly more recent immigrants (unless you’re unusually inbred). I have a cool little family story about an ancestor coming over almost 400 years ago, but why would I make that a big deal for my current identity, especially over all my other more recent ancestors?

@dissproportion I find the term itself silly, but there has to be a way for the many millions of people with this background to conceive of themselves, or else they’re the one group of people on the planet who can’t have an ethnic identity, just because too many people assimilated into theirs.

@dissproportion It can be understood as “predominantly descended from colonial British settlers,” the same way “Irish American” means predominantly descended from Irish immigrants. People say “heritage” instead of “British” to recognize those settlers set our cultural and political foundations