April 10, 2015

Are cops more likely to harm innocent whites in places of high diversity?

Like the Rodney King video of the early 1990s, the recent over-reaction of a white cop who shot an unarmed fleeing black suspect in the back in South Carolina will provoke much discussion about white cops and black victims.

Too many whites settle into the view of "Well, whatever the police have to do to keep the violent blacks at bay." But it is not realistic that a cop who is that callous toward blacks will somehow transform into a respectful servant when he's dealing with whites. The cop sees himself as pest control, and whether he has to unload his bug spray on hornets, termites, or your pet dog who didn't get out of the way like he was ordered to, makes no difference to him. All those different species of pests had it coming.

One of the key findings on ethnic diversity, from Robert Putnam's research, is that it erodes trust. The "no duh" outcome is that diversity makes people of one race lower their trust in people of a different race. But the surprising and disturbing outcome is that diversity even makes people of one race lower their trust in fellow members of their own race.

In Los Angeles, not only do whites not trust the Mexicans, they don't even trust the other whites, and remain fragmented and impotent to organize for their own collective good. It's the polar opposite from white civic participation in a homogeneous part of the country like North Dakota or Iowa.

In short, when an individual is confronted with a Tower of Babel environment, which offers no possibility of coordinating a group's interests at the collective level, he withdraws from communal life and focuses only on his nuclear family, or perhaps just himself.

I suspect there's a strong influence of this dynamic at work in the growing and unregulated police state around the country. You tend to only hear about it in places with high levels of diversity.

The apologetic white response is that white cops in such areas would prefer to stick to their preference of targeting only blacks and Mexicans, and leave the nice whites alone, but are compelled by The Powers That Be to appear less racist, and therefore go after innocent whites to "narrow the gap" and avoid harassment, firing, and shakedowns.

When you look into what white cops are up to, though, you don't see people who love their own group and hate different groups. You see people who are in a hunkering-down, under-siege mentality just like Putnam's research would predict for folks living in areas of high ethnic diversity. Only these paranoids are armed to the teeth and don't even have to let you know you're about to be raided.

Thus, the more likely reason behind white cops over-targeting white folks in highly diverse areas is not to appear to be closing the gap, avoid harassment by the federal Department of Diversity, etc. Those white cops simply don't trust their fellow white citizens.

Contrary to liberal propaganda, these types do not put "white pride" bumper stickers on their car, but ones that say, "I'm not racist -- I hate everyone equally". Again, they are not trying to avoid harassment by the anti-racism squads: they honestly perceive members of their own group as potential bugs that may need to get squashed if they act too uppity, like sleeping below the window that you lobbed a flashbang grenade through.

This is impressionistic, but I think on the right track. Unfortunately the data that could resolve these questions are not collected, let alone published -- over-reactions by police, broken down by race of cop and race of victim, and broken down by geography.

Here are a few suggestive maps, though. The first comes from the Cato Institute's effort to map out botched SWAT-style raids (see full details by using their interactive map here). The second is USA Today's index of diversity, showing the chance that two randomly chosen people will belong to different ethnic groups.



The raid map would need to be made into one showing per capita rates, but I don't think that'll make such a big difference. Also bear in mind that the pin marks look crowded and exaggerate how far north the signal goes, since it's only the point at the bottom that they are measuring.

Highly homogeneous states like Ohio and Michigan are in the top 10 US states by population size, yet there are few pin marks on the raid map, and most of them are near the few hotspots of diversity in the region, like Detroit and Cleveland. Smaller but more diverse states like Colorado have more pin marks. So do similar-sized but highly diverse states like Georgia.

Leaving aside the marks that represent the killing of a cop, and focusing only on harm from cops to citizens, Ohio has 7 pin marks and Michigan just 4. Their population size is 11.6 million and 9.9 million, respectively. Colorado has 10 pin marks, about as much as both states combined, yet it has only about half as many people as either state alone (5.4 million). Georgia also has 10 pin marks, while being comparable in population (10.1 million). What Colorado and Georgia share, and what distinguish them from Michigan and Ohio, is a much higher level of ethnic diversity.

Zooming into the city level, the Columbus metro area has 0 marks involving harm to citizens, whereas similarly sized metro areas that are highly diverse like Las Vegas and Orlando have 2 and 7 marks. The 90% white Pittsburgh metro area only has 1 mark involving citizens, despite being similar in size to highly diverse metro areas like Baltimore and Charlotte, both of which have 4 marks against them.

A more exhaustive list of incidents would have to be made, and a more fine-grained analysis performed, to settle the matter. But at first glance, it does appear that a higher level of ethnic diversity is linked to a greater tendency of callous over-reaction by cops.

Still, are the victims of these over-reactions white or black? Again we need better data. Sticking with the topical location of Charleston, SC, there is a pin mark on the raid map showing a lockdown style raid of Stratford High School in 2003, with the aim of busting up drug deals. Today that school is 60% white, and so back then would probably have been more like 65-70% white. Yet video from the school's surveillance cameras show whites as well as blacks being treated like bugs by the pest control.

Diversity not only corrodes civic participation from citizens, it also leads to callous aggressive harassment of those citizens by the police. This problem is compounded by the difficulty of citizens organizing in highly diverse areas -- they can't coordinate an effort to de-escalate the increasingly paramilitary tactics of their own police forces.

Whites and blacks both got harassed by The Man in Stratford High School, but blacks and whites can't team up on anything, so The Man is free to continue his SWAT-style raids into the future. See also the poor labor history of the South, where whites and blacks couldn't coordinate to collectively bargain with owners and managers. Worse: whites can't even coordinate with their fellow whites and fight a one-team battle against the elites.

This ought to be the focus of the anti-diversity movement for the 21st century -- not the obvious conflicts that will erupt between different ethnic groups, but the corrosive and authoritarian effects it will have within the white group itself. Putnam's research and these various real-world phenomena show that there is no silver lining at all to diversity, not even an emboldened "Us vs. Them" mentality. Instead it results in "every man for himself," the worst possible scenario.

35 comments:

  1. .if overreaction is a byproduct of diversity, which is a byproduct of the transplant phenomenon, this means that racial violence in general correlates with inequality(and rising crime). The 80s saw race riots and street battles between blacks and Irish and Italians. I wonder if the 1900-1920 period saw similar events. Wasn't that the age of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching?

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  2. Yes, see Peter Turchin on the cycles in collective / organized political violence. There was a peak during the Civil War (Irish immigrants in the NYC draft riots), another around 1920 (major race riots), another around 1970 (where blacks had transplanted outside of their home in the South), and coming up in 2020...

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  3. One big problem imposed by diversity is the anxiety about "selling out". If you're surrounded by co-ethnics nothing is seen as anti-your race. But greater mingling with other races will trigger a (perhaps unconscious) feeling of guilt that you aren't doing enough to respect your race. Your blood and your history.

    I wonder if white Gen X-ers (and especially Late Gen X-ers as well as Millennials) essentially have adopted a harsh, nihilistic, and fatalistic attitude towards things because of the tremendous stressor of life long exposure to high diversity levels. Being told to lie back and enjoy it to boot also probably adds a certain cognitive dissonance. Every fiber of your instinctive being is telling you to flee or fight while you tell others (and often yourself) that alien groups aren't so bad as history/common sense/"prejudice" makes them out to be.

    Boomers outside the deep South grew up with minimal exposure to diversity in their childhood/adolescence. Southern Boomers aren't stupid about blacks, but the other Boomers still remain quite sanguine about diversity (especially blacks who will always be a central tenet of the Boomer self-concept). You still hear non-Southern white Boomers give the South tons of crap. This stuff will largely die with the Boomers, seeing as how younger whites grew up with way more diversity and will never be as smugly naive as white northern Boomers.

    You can't underestimate the fact that white kids growing up in the 80's and beyond grew up in a different country (if you define a country by it's blood) than white Boomers. Boomers are never gonna give a damn since the privileged and idealistic circumstances of their youth created enough goodwill to last a lifetime. Simply put, they don't have the experience or empathy (and at this late date, the mental horsepower) to grasp what a dystopian hell hole their descendants have been burdened with. What kind of environment would allow Master of Puppets to go Gold in the mid 80's?

    They began wondering in the 80's why Gen X teens were "slackers". Seems like the rising garbage created by the me Generation was already suffocating them back then. Later births are going to be even more traumatized.

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  4. "Contrary to liberal propaganda, these types do not put "white pride" bumper stickers on their car, but ones that say, "I'm not racist -- I hate everyone equally""

    I think a lot of the antipathy towards cops is driven by the paranoid climate and also by personal bad experiences. Maybe to a few hardcore liberals it's driven by the PC idea that cops are racist; but at this stage of the game everybody has had enough run-ins with the law (and known others with horror stories) to have a personal dog in the fight.

    Here in my mostly white neck of the woods (with the diversity being many ethnicities instead of lots of toxic blacks), you see cops in their freshly minted black cars constantly. We've got similar crime levels as the 1950's but I seriously doubt relatively safe areas of the 50's saw so many goddam cops lurking at every turn. I guess maybe there were similar proportions of cops in the 50's but everyone got along better so the feelings weren't as hard. Who knows?

    There's a real police state type of atmosphere that's intensified in tandem with rising diversity and rising inequality. The fact that a place like Minnesota has this sort of surveillance suggests to me that police states are mainly an inequality thing. I'll give you the thing about cops being more abusive in diverse areas, though.

    It seems like rising inequality produces greater and greater numbers of disgruntled, hungry, out of work people. So that necessitates greater monitoring by authorities. In Eisenhower's America, it would've seemed silly to have so many cops. What for, exactly?

    What's quite alarming is that America's adventurism is prepping a lot of hardened people to "clean up" the streets. What's more, a lot of them actually buy into the "us Vs. them crap since they've grown up entirely in a low empathy/high striving climate. If it pays the bills and keeps the "good guys" on top, what's not to love? I've given the Boomers a lot of crap, but the Boomer cops of the 70's and even 80's weren't so quick to dehumanize and villify vast swaths of America in the name of "security". So they weren't as trigger happy. It's telling also that many Boomers questioned the nature of how America treated south Asia and it's people during the Vietnam flare up. Even for many who served, they hated the blind patriotism that leads to arrogantly abusing others.

    Meanwhile, in today's callous and selfish climate, where are the war movies about recent conflicts that don't sugar coat the dehumanization of war, let alone question the purpose of war? To the contrary, we get endless jingoism particularly with the non-stop WW2 movies, Te easiest way to soften people on war mongering is via WW2 since even toddlers can understand why we had to go to war to stop Hitler and the Japs. But why did we "have" to wage war in Vietnam or Iraq? Forget about questioning why, let's just be "sensitive" to our veterans by constantly patting them on the back. Also. basically patting ourselves on the back and helping to ease our conscience 'cuz we all know deep down inside that we've needlessly sent legions of fragile young people to death, insanity, or infirmity for no good reason at all.

    I think the average American is deeply ashamed of the cost of all of this striving (and war is definitely a hallmark of striving). But right now most people are in "keep you head down and your mouth shut" mode due to both fear and the autistic stupor caused by narcissism, indulgence, and gibness. When we start to actually engage with humanity again, maybe we can at the very least stop slaughtering both the "enemy" and ourselves for the sake of an elite pissing contest.

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  5. "This stuff will largely die with the Boomers"

    It's too bad people don't die as early as they used to.

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  6. "We've got similar crime levels as the 1950's..."

    Side note, since I didn't post on it before, but the murder rate for 2013 fell to 4.5 (per 100K), a 10% decline since the late 2000s. For most of the 2000s, it looked like the murder rate would bottom out around 5.5, but since 2009 it's been steadily falling again.

    Indeed all violent and property crime rates are in decline through 2013.

    "but I seriously doubt relatively safe areas of the 50's saw so many goddam cops lurking at every turn."

    Mayberry was close to the norm, from what I've heard. The soaring incarceration rate is part of the rising-inequality trend -- a return to Victorian "tough on crime" norms like the workhouse, debtors' prisons, and the like.

    It wasn't until the Progressive Era that people started to loathe the spectacle of public executions. For most of the Great Compression, the criminological norm was rehabilitation rather than retribution (for better or worse).

    Locking everybody up worsens inequality: the poor suffer lost wages and a stigma when they get out and apply for a job, while the white-collar criminals won't even be brought to trial. It stems from the laissez-faire norm, which is to not care what happens to others as long as you're OK.

    Rehabilitation narrows inequality and stems from the norm of accommodating others into a cohesive whole.

    Both swing toward extremes and bring about a backlash. Too much harsh crime-and-punishment leads people to sympathize with innocents languishing in jail, and de-escalate the war on crime. Too much leniency leads people to gasp at how easily a child molester was allowed back into society to offend again, and to re-escalate the war on crime.

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  7. What's your impression of how Millennials on the whole view war, soldiers, the military institutions, foreign policy, etc.?

    Gen X didn't have much direct experience with war, but the mass media / pop culture we were raised on was largely based on the Boomers' experience with the War in Vietnam (both the war abroad and the reaction here). It permeated war movies in general -- Aliens was basically the Vietnam War in space.

    There was a semi-successful TV movie adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front in 1979, and heavy metal fans would have been introduced to Johnny Got His Gun from the music video for "One" by Metallica in '88, or shown on Beavis and Butt-Head five years later. (I managed to easily track that movie down in the '90s without Netflix, interlibrary loan, etc., so it must not have been uncommon at video rental stores).

    Already by 1994, Legends of the Fall tried to make the trenches look like a child's game of capture the flag, whereas in real life Brad Pitt's character would've gotten mowed down sometime after he made it behind German lines.

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  8. "Officer safety" from any real or imagined threats, however slight, now trumps all other considerations. After that, the single most important issue is protection of the pension.

    Based on the fact that police are almost always unquestioningly backed up by judges, prosecutors and their unions - even in the most egregious situations - it was completely reasonable for the South Carolina cop to believe he could kill a fleeing, nonviolent suspect with impunity.

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  9. What's your impression of how Millennials on the whole view war, soldiers, the military institutions, foreign policy, etc.?

    The earliest Millennials are now about 30 and so far they've exerted little influence on the culture. Mostly they just dutifully go along with things because, well, they don't do much else. This conformity I'm sure is even stronger with the ones born since about 1988. The '84--'87 Millennials at least got 2-5 teenage years before 9/11 inflicted dementia on our critical thinking faculties and gave the culture a grand opportunity for the demonizing of both the enemy without (Arabs/Muslims) and within (the "unpatriotic" anti-war element who have been vindicated in the years since).

    Being 14/15/16 in 1999/2000/early 2001 meant that early Millennials got a taste of the irreverent but unpretentious Gen X fashion. They also spent time with Gen X siblings/neighbors/acquaintances in the those years who probably had a positive impact.

    But if you were born after '88 you probably are terrified of being seen as anti soldier/anti American. Their entire formative period (14-24) occurred when war mongering and dehumanization were hip. So later (e.g. more naive and conformist) Millennials accept the war machine. Most Boomers will always be hostile to the military (to the point of crossing the line disrespect towards the grunts). Maybe most mid-late period Millennials will always be the gullible pro war crowd.

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  10. With regard to Millenial conformity- Does anyone born in '88 or after actually read this blog? If so, speak up.

    Aliens is a good movie (and a great shoot 'em up as these things go) but the over macho of the characters is a little bit much these days. Maybe you had to be there? I understand it's an analogy for military arrogance but I don't think the soldiers in 'Nam were that brash and cocky. Obviously the upper brass was and to make the analogy more accurate they should've portrayed the soldiers more modestly in Aliens.

    In movies actually about 'Nam, the characters generally are not that obnoxiously brash. Justifiably so given that the 60's/early 70's were still close to the self effacing/stoic mid century. In Platoon, we get basically one guy who relishes the mayhem and he's by far the most annoying character. That guys nickname is Bunny if memory serves, and nicknaming also fits into the lack of pretention and camaraderie that were common from the 20's-70's.

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  11. "Does anyone born in '88 or after actually read this blog? If so, speak up."

    I'm close. I read this blog regularly but was born in early '85.

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  12. OT: Agnostic proven right again. How badly did Will Smith molest his son?

    https://celebrity.yahoo.com/blogs/celeb-news/jaden-smith-wears-a-dress--is-totally-casual-about-it-214214195.html

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  13. "Both swing toward extremes and bring about a backlash. Too much harsh crime-and-punishment leads people to sympathize with innocents languishing in jail, and de-escalate the war on crime. Too much leniency leads people to gasp at how easily a child molester was allowed back into society to offend again, and to re-escalate the war on crime."

    Wouldn't it be possible to break the cycle and just trend towards equality?

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  14. "this sort of surveillance suggests to me that police states are mainly an inequality thing. "

    not so sure about that, Nazi Germany existed during a time of rising-equality. though, I suspect, that the type of police state and surveillance used differs depending on if equality is rising or falling.

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  15. I dunno, I am really wondering what rising-crime and rising-equality is going to look like this time around. There are two times in the recent past when crime and equality rose together: the '20s, and the '60s-70s. both periods followed the same pattern - an initial outburst of euphoria followed by a depression or recession.

    Turchin says that rising equality, at least initially, is associated with a decrease in population. that could have scary consequences. and will there be an economic crash or depression this time?

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  16. To answer the title of your post, yes. My source is a retired sheriff who worked in a rural/suburban county next to mid sized city in the midwest. Anyway, his county lost several officers to the city because of better pay and benefits. One thing he said surprised me, many of the officers wanted to work in the rougher parts of that city. They wanted to be near the action. I just don't think that kind of atmosphere would be good for the soul long term and I'm not sure I would want a force made up of people who wanted to be where the action is. It is odd, CEO salaries seem ridiculous but cop benefits bug me even more. I don't know why that is. Anyway, I like the retired sheriff and he always telling me that the place we both work should have a union. Such a baby boomer.

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  17. "OT: Agnostic proven right again. How badly did Will Smith molest his son?"

    Both of Jaden Smith's parents are homos, so he's way more genetically predisposed to being a fairy himself. Add to that being raised in LA. Add being molested by his fag dad. Add perhaps being molested by other friends / associates of his dad. He never stood a chance of turning out normal.

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  18. Feryl: What's your impression of how Millennials on the whole view war, soldiers, the military institutions, foreign policy, etc.?

    Not agnostic, my impression is that White Millennials don't really see anything wrong with the military per se, yet are not happy with the surveillance state, have issues with militaries that pursuing nationalist ends, and are skeptical over interventionalism. That's how it seems here anyway, maybe the US is different.

    Still, there are a couple of the typical data sources for the US on this to test my impression:
    On the GSS, in the 2000-2010 period, there is a switchover among White Millennials saying they have more confidence in the army than Baby Boomers, who have the least out of the generations on it. The difference is driven by more Millennials saying they have a great deal of confidence in the army, whereas more Baby Boomers say only some.

    That's true among many institutions though. Baby Boomers are the nadir of confidence in medicine, banks, education, clergy. The Me Generation always knows better. For political institutions like the judiciary, and legislative branch, the Me Generation and surviving Silents are equally the low confidence sceptics. It seems like there aren't really any areas where the Xers and Millennials have less confidence in institutions, even organized religion though they're less religious.

    On the questions on whether the US should be active in international affairs, the Boomers tend to peak taking an active part vs staying out, and they tend to think it least likely that the US will be at war in 10 years. Millennials are less pro-international engagement.

    It's hard to tell how this GSS stuff reflects pro-military sentiment or more or less confidence in the military's competence.

    Other data source is Pew have done some questions on this, and Millennials are more anti-war- "Millennials expressed less support for an “assertive” national security policy than other generations. In addition, 60 percent of the Silent Generation and 55 percent of Baby Boomers believe in a stronger military presence as compared to less than 40 percent of Millennials."

    Millennials are more liberal generally when it comes to being war vs diplomacy - http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/03/section-8-domestic-and-foreign-policy-views/

    So to me it looks like the typical state of affairs.

    Boomers expect very active institutions which work hard for their benefit, but always whinge and moan about how those institutions are not competent enough (like I say, the Me Generation always knows better) and are always sure they're paying too much in tax.

    While Millennials generally think institutions are pretty good and its reasonable to pay tax (maybe because they're superficial thinkers and happy clappy, brittle optimists), but looks like their general patterns of being rather hesitant about action and forceful behaviour and pessimistic about action relative to inaction extend to government action.

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  19. " Baby Boomers are the nadir of confidence in medicine, banks, education, clergy. The Me Generation always knows better."

    The least trustworthy people tend to be the least trusting in others. A lot of Boomers subconsciously realize this though most of them will never admit it. After a half century+ of them smugly bossing everyone around they're not gonna admit how much they've wrecked the West with their libertine showboating.

    "Millennials are less pro-international engagement."
    "Millennials are more liberal generally when it comes to being war vs diplomacy"

    So far, given the lack of Gen X and early Millennial representation in the towers of power, It's safe to say that neither generation is interested in gaining clout and then throwing their weight around. The professional and political usually follows from the personal. Gen X whites and Millennials of all races have been quite peaceable and tolerant in their personal lives (tolerant in the sense of mild mannered respect, not in the sense of PC idiocy) . So they don't believe in belligerent relations with other countries.

    Meanwhile, late Silents and Boomers whipped up a volatile and threatening atmosphere wherever they went. First it was with their family (don't trust anyone over 30 was said without irony) , then with their friends, then at college, then as they shamelessly grabbed for power and money wherever else they went. Including, tragically, the high levels of government and the military. It's all about what I want; what's in it for ME?

    Really, the Boomers I don't think were ever that driven by sincerity and empathy; it was more about being oppositional to anything that they felt was standing in their way. I suppose that some of them weren't so bad early on given that the 60's/70's still had vestiges of the modest mid century culture. But the gloves were totally off by the 80's.

    Gen X-ers and early Millennials saw this tooth and nail competition and arrogance and shook their heads. I'm not sure how many of them had any real coherent attitude or detailed philosophy about any of this; it was more "god the Boomers are annoying can't they just relax and listen for once instead of always focusing on tightening their grip on everything?"

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  20. "White Millennials don't really see anything wrong with the military per se, yet are not happy with the surveillance state,"

    Now that you mention it, one of the few times I've overheard Millennials discussing politics -- as in, a back-and-forth conversation lasting more than two exchanges -- was in the wake of the Snowden scandal, about how much leeway the intelligence agencies ought to have in spying on their own citizens. Both were wary of the idea, one more so than the other.

    "looks like their general patterns of being rather hesitant about action and forceful behaviour and pessimistic about action relative to inaction extend to government action."

    The closest thing they have to a protest song is "Waiting on the World to Change" (nice bass melody by Pino Palladino btw).

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  21. "Really, the Boomers I don't think were ever that driven by sincerity and empathy; it was more about being oppositional to anything that they felt was standing in their way."

    The clearest place to see this motivation playing out is familial duties and responsibilities. It's one of the most basic and necessary classes of duties to others, and they have a long-term genetic self-interest in fulfilling them. But when it's all about short-term status-climbing for the individual, they have to cut the cord to their family.

    The so-called sexual revolution when the Me Generation were young adults was not so much about hedonism (which only a minority were indulging in), but the de-regulation of sexual behavior in order to allow individuals to not have to assume responsibilities to others as a result of having sex.

    Birth control, and especially abortion -- how else is a striving woman, and her striving boyfriend / husband, going to maximize income if she becomes hijacked by a parasite that takes 9 months to eject, and years still after to recover from?

    Sterilization is something most people haven't focused on, but it too rose during the '60s through the late '80s, as Me Gen women wanted certainty that they would not become hijacked by another baby-parasite ever again.

    Gen X and now Millennials are far less favorable toward abortion or getting their tubes tied.

    Divorce, particularly when it creates a broken home for children, was another victory for the no-responsibility-to-others crowd.

    There are subtler ways that the absentee parent phenomenon manifests itself. Single-parent homes are an obvious form. But even then, the mother doesn't perform much of a maternal housewife role.

    Watch re-runs of Leave It to Beaver, and see how often the Me Gen had to do household chores when they themselves were children -- almost never. Their June Cleaver style mother did the dishes, swept and mopped the floors, vacuumed the carpeting, did the laundry, and generally took care of everything inside the home. Their Ward Cleaver style father took care of everything outside the home -- mowing the lawn, washing down the car, cleaning out the gutters, and so on.

    Nowadays, if that stuff gets done by any family member -- and it is more common to be outsourced to hired laborers -- it is dumped on the children in return for an allowance or the sense of "earning their keep," a contract-centered phrase that Ward and June would never have uttered toward Wally and the Beave.

    Kids used to occasionally wash dishes, take out the trash, etc., but stewardship of the household generally rested with the parents. When parents abandoned their role as stewards, it became outsourced to random Mexicans or to the children.

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  22. "On the GSS, in the 2000-2010 period, there is a switchover among White Millennials saying they have more confidence in the army than Baby Boomers, who have the least out of the generations on it. The difference is driven by more Millennials saying they have a great deal of confidence in the army, whereas more Baby Boomers say only some."

    The level of jingoism has been growing in American culture since the 80's. The 90's did have a certain level of paranoia about authority, but I think that was driven mainly by brash libertarian Boomers and detached Gen X-ers being wary. And also the overall petulant vibe of the 90's. In general, the pro military vibe of the last several decades is much different than the level of ferocious hostility that the Me Generation had towards authority (especially towards the military) in the 60's/early 70's before the Me Gen. started becoming authority in the late 70's/80's.

    A military simulator like Call of Duty would've horrified the peace and love era. Millennials (esp. the post '88 ones) can not remember a period where you weren't supposed to automatically give the military (including the upper brass) the benefit of the doubt.

    The sometimes atrocious bloodshed of Vietnam scared the crap out of America in the 60's/early 70's. But the atrocities of the post 9/11 era are glibly explained away as an unpleasant side effect of the fight to keep America "safe" and "free". As empathy levels have fallen further and further in tandem with rising inequality since about 1980 I don't sense much genuine outrage and disgust over America's increasing arrogant and delusional behavior. Even though, like I say, X-ers and Millennials have a personal distaste for conflict.

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  23. The Silent Generation were infamous for never capturing the presidency, and you could argue they were apolitical in general.

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  24. Relevant to discussion:
    http://www.unz.com/isteve/garry-trudeau-punching-upward/

    Trudeau's comments are embarrassingly revealing. You don't even have to really point out how smarmy an early Boomer like him is. He basically tells you upfront how entitled he is. First it was an entitlement to defy the establishment and do whatever he thought was amusing and good for his career; after establishing his career suddenly he and his cohorts are off-limits.

    The irony is staggering; he chafes at the "stuffy" (aka classy) old guard and literally wants them dead so he can get his way faster. Now that Trudeau and his ilk are the old guard they do their damnedest to drown out other voices.

    What else do you expect from the generation that embraced polyester because they didn't want laundry to take time away from goofing off and making it big.

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  25. To Feryl: "With regard to Millenial conformity- Does anyone born in '88 or after actually read this blog? If so, speak up."

    I was born in 1992, and have been reading this blog for six or seven years. I am happy to answer questions about my cohort, but I must warn you that my personal circumstances, and hence experiences, are atypical.

    Specifically: I am a convert to Roman Catholicism (with a predilection for the Latin mass and traditionalism) who was born to militant atheist Indian immigrants. I attended high school in the states (two years at a boarding school in New Hampshire, then two years at a public school in Bethesda MD), but previously attended international schools in a number of cities. I also suffer from a painful genetic condition which proved a barrier to participating in athletic activities, which remains a significant part of socialisation in the USA.

    Growing up in today's atomised environment I often felt the culture around me was perverse in many respects. This blog has been immensely helpful in understanding the behaviour of my peers and myself.

    On the present topic, I must concur that levels of trust seem very low. It was bad in high school, but far worse during my undergraduate degree. Agnostic's discussion of this phenomenon has resonated very well with my experiences.

    That said, I detect almost no support for the army amongst my peers. This may be an east coast/Ivy League phenomenon but they generally follow the PC line on abusive cops and pacifist-isolationist views on foreign policy. They generally think themselves above the army, which is outdated and dangerously hierarchical.

    I am probably more like the Millenials agnostic discusses in that I am inclined to defer to authority figures in law enforcement and politics; feel free to speculate on whether this is related to my religion.

    I again concur with agnostic on the topic of cops who are involved in these incidents. Lack of trust really does produce people without the right measure of prudence and somewhat deformed personalities; the consequences are there for all to see.



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  26. an interesting video(with map) of the US breaking up into 38 :

    http://www.answers.com/article/1276447/what-would-the-united-states-look-like-if?paramt=1&param4=fb-us-de-money-hl&param1=dailydose&param2=48796041&param5=10152182877711186&param6=null

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  27. "That said, I detect almost no support for the army amongst my peers. This may be an east coast/Ivy League phenomenon but they generally follow the PC line on abusive cops and pacifist-isolationist views on foreign policy."

    I don't think a lot Millennials realize just how anti-military many people were from the mid 60's-very early 80's. G.I. Joe toys gradually drifted away from military realism as the 70's went on. The line was cancelled altogether by about 1977. After the US hockey victory of '80 and the renewal of "traditional" values symbolized by Reagan's election (further strengthened after he survived in assassination), Hasbro renewed the G.I. Joe line in 1982 with a total focus on a "specialized mobile strike force" military theme . Thus allowing for a wide variety of well armed characters, vehicles, and sets. The only 80's figure not to come with a weapon or an armed vehicle was named Tollbooth who came with a bridge laying vehicle. Virtually all popular boys action figure toys of the 80's came with weapons.

    Still, some liberal parents in the 80's still hadn't gotten over the horror of Vietnam and didn't allow their boys to own toy soldiers. So I've heard from a few Gen X kids. The popularity of war games and toys with Gen X/early Millennial adults (some of them parents by now) and late Millennials kids says a lot about Gen X-ers/Millennials taking an at least cool/neutral approach to the military even though many of them have a distaste for conflict of any kind.

    One could argue, I suppose, that 80's parental disapproval of violent toys fits into that decade's now notorious panics over heavy metal, Dungeons and Dragons, MTV etc. I think that Me Gen parents were nervous about their kids making some of the same mistakes that the Me Gen once did. So there were some attempts at trying to tone down the culture after the sleazy 70's. By the 90's Slick Willie was elected and the culture got nastier again.

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  28. 88 here. I comment here sometimes about how much I hate fags. I also fluctuate between Gen X and Gen Y (I hate the word Millenial), meaning I can see and think like both sides. I love this blog and the manosphere, and I have been reading them since 2006. This blog was a later entry, perhaps four or five years ago, but I've been enjoying it ever since the discovery. I'm an outlier for my age group, and I do share what I read on blogs with my friends, who do agree with my sanitized translation. I'm guessing Gen Y guys (ugh, Millenials) do read—not just this blog but other manosphere blogs—but it is relatively small compared to older generations. Gen X seems to be the sweet spot for median age, and it gets younger or older depending on the blogger's age and the topics he covers.

    Anyway, Agnostic, other commentators, keep it up. You guys are great.

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  29. More adventures in entitlement:
    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/04/13/former-members-of-congress-lobbying-jobs/25703945/

    "A lot of people really don't know how Washington works, especially back home in the district," said McKeon, a California Republican. "Based on 22 years serving in Congress and getting bills passed, you kind of learn how the system works."

    "If you can help somebody out with a problem, that's a satisfying thing," said McKeon, 76. "What else am I going to do? Sit in a rocking chair?"

    Hey geezer, isn't it about time you and your generation be considerate and graceful? Sheesh, you're almost dead. Drop the conceit and relax. You don't have much time left to make amends so you ought to get a clue while you still can. I guess I'm not respecting my elders, am I? But since when did the Me Generation respect anyone?

    Mckeon is a 1938 birth. The Silent Gen has proven to be as callous and greedy as the Boomers. Their smaller numbers and more timid nature has allowed their rep to remain mostly intact. They definitely don't get the crap they deserve considering how many scumbag thieves, liars, and killers were born in the late 20's and 30's.

    The ramping up of corruption, crime, and decay that started around 1960 can be heavily attributed to figures from the Silent Gen. Of course, Boomer youngsters are rightfully regarded as bringers of chaos in the 60's/70's but they were following a trail blazed by the Silents. Which was overlooked mostly because Silents weren't boastful and also because there just weren't that many Silents.

    The FBI loves to take credit for bringing down the mob by about 1990 in America. The reality is that white Gen X-ers were just not interested in being criminals. By the early 90's the Silent and Boomer mob figures had run out of refuge from the law and were also running out of impressionable and cold hearted kids to do their dirty work. The fact that so many born from about 1925-1955 are so prone to psychopathology might be be one of the most overlooked but important facts about Western history.

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  30. a little off-topic, but here's an interesting article I found on the Weather Underground trying to assasinate police in the 60s and 70s. people forget how extreme those groups really were:

    "He writes about the Weather Underground and other groups whose members he says, quote, "mistakenly believed the country was on the brink of a genuine, political revolution and thought that violence would speed the change,"

    "I quote one of the Weatherman memorably saying, I kind of thought it would be 1975, maybe the revolution would come in '77. But that they believed a revolution was imminent and that violence would speed the change as it had in China, in North Vietnam and in Cuba."

    "They went underground essentially - we show - I think we prove with on-the-record interviews in the book with an intention of attacking and attempting to kill policemen and military officers. This was a strategy that did not last long because their political prowess far exceeded their technical prowess and they had a bomb go off that killed three of their people. It was after that that they embarked on a very different strategy of largely symbolic protest bombings - bombings done late at night of empty buildings."

    "But the target early on for the Weather Underground, as you describe it, was police. Why police?"

    "ere was a sense that it was really violent, black rhetoric - especially that emanating from the Black Panthers - that informed most of the people that initially went underground - the first group, the Weather Underground and the second, the Black Liberation Army. And African-American militants at that point had an array of complaints, but chief among them, first among them, was always police brutality, that policemen throughout America largely were able to kill black men, black Americans, with impunity. And, you know, we quote people from Weather saying look, we wanted to do what the Panthers wanted to and what the Black Liberation Army wanted to do later and that is kill policeman, to, quote, "fight back." It seems amazing now, but that's what they intended to do."

    http://www.npr.org/2015/04/13/399351658/how-young-people-went-underground-during-the-70s-days-of-rage

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  31. " the Weather Underground trying to assasinate police in the 60s and 70s. people forget how extreme those groups really were:"

    The unrest of that period is famous but a lot of younger people probably aren't quite aware of just how dangerous the excesses of the period were.

    What's not really understood by many people at all is that things like draft dodging and bomb planting exist on a continuum of irresponsible/selfish behavior by the Me Generation. We know about the protests, the raging against authority and so but how often is that placed in the context of a period that also saw growing numbers of people born in the 30's/40's/50's becoming involved in serial killing, child molesting, robberies, drug pushing, gambling, extortion rackets, pimping, or some combination of these things.

    They really showed the "squares", didn't they? The colorful and charismatic figures of this era make it easier to overlook just how diseased so much of the Me Gen was (and largely still is).

    Here's another hushed up/undeseveredly forgotten saga of scumbaggery involving them:

    http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/Franklin/FranklinCoverup/franklin.htm

    Why was there a "panic" about pedo sex rings in the 80's? Why were people becoming vigilant and law-and-order conservative in the 80's? Because of stuff like that crime ring. These kinds of rings were not as rare as you might think. With the internet making it easy to grab stupid pervs these days, there's an effect of making sex crimes seem as common as ever. In fact, the level of depravity shown by the Me Gen during their peak crime years of young adulthood/early middle age that coincided with the 60's-80's was horrifically brutal. In the case of sex crimes, it wasn't always relatively gentle contact. Nope, it all too often was aggressively violent and cruel. Forceful domination and torture by degenerate sadists.

    If you look into a lot of scandal/true crime stuff from the 70's/80's, it's depressing and pretty startling how many sickos were running around stealing, lying, cheating, raping, killing, and torturing. It kind of all runs together after a while.

    The John Decamp book about the Franklin Scandal (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0963215809/102-1734717-3423304?vi=glance) mentions boys being shipped to/from Sacramento. I seem to remember another notorious scandal involving Sacramento locals and a pedo ring. Wish I could remember the name of the case or the people involved. This kinda fits into that suicide map and how we talked about the weirdness of Nor Cal fitting with a higher suicide rate. Besides the whole gay thing in Frisco, some elements of the hippie movement also had an affinity for weird ass sexual stuff. Did hippie weirdos attracts gays/pedos or did gays/pedos make the hippies weirder? Who knows.

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  32. From the Wiki article about prolific homo killer Dean Corrl who killed dozens of older boys/teens:

    Potential association with Dallas sex ring

    During a routine investigation in March 1975, the Houston police discovered a cache of pornographic pictures and films depicting young boys. Of the 16 individuals depicted within the films and photos, 11 of the youths appeared to be among the 21 victims of Dean Corll who had been identified by this date.[175] The discovery raised the disturbing possibility that the statements Corll had given to both Henley and Brooks prior to his murder that he was associated with an organization based in Dallas that "bought and sold boys"[142] may indeed have held a degree of truth. The discovery of the material in Houston in 1975 subsequently led to the arrest of five individuals in Santa Clara, California.[176] No direct link in these arrests to the Houston Mass Murders was proven, as the Houston authorities declined to pursue any possible link to the serial killings, stating they felt Corll's victims' families had 'suffered enough'.

    There is still no conclusive evidence to suggest that Corll had ever solicited any of his victims in this manner, not only because the Houston authorities chose not to pursue this potential possibility, but also because neither David Brooks nor Wayne Henley have ever mentioned meeting any individuals from the "organization" Corll had claimed he was involved with. In addition to these facts, they have never mentioned ever having seen the victims either filmed, photographed or released from Corll's torture board until after their torture and murder. The arrests in Santa Clara do, however, indicate a possible validity into Brooks' statements to police that Corll had informed him that his earliest murder victims had been buried in California.[120]

    Yup, Santa Clara is in the Bay area. Go figure. It seems like the most homo friendly area in America would, naturally, lead to pervs teaming up and doing even more damage than they would do on their own.

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  33. The Weathermen were also heavily Jewish. Way over 2%, something nearer to 50% (give or take 20%) when I looked into it.

    People think that overt Jewish subversion ended with the Rosenbergs and other Los Alamos traitors, who were mostly Jewish too. But it continued right through the most recent peak of overt collective violence circa 1970.

    By then the Jews had assimilated enough not to be identified by ethnicity during the Days of Rage, the botched bomb that blew up their Greenwich Village home, and the rest. Unlike Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, who were deported back to Europe during anti-WWI uprisings.

    Instead, the Weathermen and similar groups were generic white college students, white youths, etc. You had to be farther outside of the founding stock to qualify as ethnic domestic terrorists, a la the Black Panthers or the American Indian Movement.

    It'll be interesting to see if the Jews will be so over-represented in collective violence and overt subversion when the next peak occurs in the next 5 to 10 years.

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  34. it was completely reasonable for the South Carolina cop to believe he could kill a fleeing, nonviolent suspect with impunity.

    1987 here. You likely missed the part of the video where the suspect struggles with the cop to the ground for control of his taser, then flees without the cop's knowledge that the taser is or is not in his possession. The video also shows one of the darts lodged in the officer's uniform. "Non-violent", indeed.

    Which is not to say there aren't terrible crimes committed by cops against non-violent folks. Homeless white man Kelly Thomas was beaten to death by lead murderer Manuel Ramos, but no one in the press likes that racial shake-up.

    Aliens is a good movie (and a great shoot 'em up as these things go) but the over macho of the characters is a little bit much these days. Maybe you had to be there? I understand it's an analogy for military arrogance but I don't think the soldiers in 'Nam were that brash and cocky. Obviously the upper brass was and to make the analogy more accurate they should've portrayed the soldiers more modestly in Aliens.

    Do you know any infantrymen? They are the men who actually conduct warfare. They act like that. The ones I know are Millenials who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Read some Keith Nolan for a look into the infantrymen of Vietnam. Sure, they're not all like that, but a hearty (and heartening) number are.

    And I wouldn't call it arrogance, but bravado in the face of fear. The brass, or in the case of Aliens, the company men, are arrogant, yes, but mostly ignorant of how war is conducted when circumstances change. That's why they refuse to assist the U.S. in winning any "police action" conducted over the last several decades. Actually, you're right, I'd call it arrogance because they refuse to change, which means to them that they're admitting they've been wrong.

    (Which is not to say the infantry are never insufferable, arrogant bastards, but that's how you live.)

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  35. In short, when an individual is confronted with a Tower of Babel environment, which offers no possibility of coordinating a group's interests at the collective level, he withdraws from communal life and focuses only on his nuclear family, or perhaps just himself.


    This is related to the whole "free-range kids,"* debate going on right now. People are hunkering down to the point where if someone doesn't hunker down they're considered crazy: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2015/04/neighbors_of_free_range_kids_what_do_you_do_when_you_see_a_kid_alone.html

    I live ~20mins from where that story takes place. It may be the most left-wing, pro-diversity, part of the DC metro area, but people want nothing to do with each other.


    *I hate that term

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